Marianne Boruch never takes me anywhere I don’t want to go. In her poems, I’m willing to follow her to a Luxor bathhouse or to a lunch at Berghoff’s with her mother, and, in The Glimpse Traveler, Boruch’s first memoir, I follow her on a road trip to California with a young woman named Frances, who is searching for people who knew her husband, Ned, and with Woody, who had once been involved with a friend of our narrator’s (who leaves the narrative halfway through, on his way to Oregon). This is the early 1970’s, after Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and we meet young men and women who still live in the mind frame of that time, though it is slowly moving forward, into a new decade.
We don’t just follow characters in this memoir, but we follow memory, associations, and the wonderful images I associate with Boruch’s poems. She lets us see California, the ocean’s “immense heart beating as usual, those mountains beginning just a shade east of the highway and rearing into cliffs or sometimes they gently rose” (134). Boruch the poet, now writing in prose, is ever with us, offering us snapshots of what she sees, offering us glimpses of memories.
The Glimpse Traveler is a book composed of brief chapters preserving each moment. Through the construction and sequence of short chapters, we start to get the idea that this is how memory reveals itself: not through long narratives, but through moments we piece together and string into a narrative. This is first and foremost what I love about the book: that it gives the reader a different way to think about memory. She also offers a narrative of landscape and the history of America, through hitchhiking from Illinois to California, and through the memories she associates with this experience.
Boruch is a natural storyteller. At the end of each chapter, she ends with a moment of suspense so that the next chapter beckons. She keeps the voice of the narrator youthful (she is 20 years old when this experience takes place) through the language and lingo she uses, as well as the moments of innocence. For all the forward thinking offered us through the many people our narrator meets, it is not the current culture that tells us who we are, but our memories, our pasts, what firmly roots us to this earth.
“The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness,” says Annie Dillard in her essay, “Seeing,” and Boruch never dams the river of her mind. So much of this trip is not just a physical journey for the narrator, but also a psychological one. We get to know Boruch through the flashbacks and associations that occur with each person she meets and each experience she has in California. The nuns at her Catholic school, a cave exploration almost turned deadly, advice from her mother, all surface during this trip, and Boruch the storyteller doesn’t keep them at bay. How much of our childhood, our past, our perspective, goes with us when we venture into the world? This is who we have been, who we might remain.
Through this exploration of memory, with Boruch we follow Frances, the reason for this trip out West. And here we have another example of the importance of memory and what happens to memory over time. At the outset of the book, we see a quick glimpse of Ned through Boruch’s memory: a curly red-head, a hippie, but someone “on the far edge of that grid” (6). Ned has passed away in a car accident in Colorado before the narrative even begins, and Frances wants to know what happened to him, wants to find people who knew him before he died. When they finally reach California, no one Frances meets can tell her any more about him than she already knew. Certain friends didn’t understand him, others worshipped him, and it is only when she sees the artwork he created before his death that she begins to understand what thoughts might have been working in his head before the accident. How much of other people’s memories can we trust? And how long can we keep a person alive through the words of others before we realize we have to let go? How long and how far can we follow a ghost?
Of course, I haven’t scratched the surface of this beautiful book: the time we spend following Boruch to California, meeting all sorts of characters, the history and geography of America, and Boruch’s beautiful prose. But take my word for it, The Glimpse Traveler is more than a book written about a generation; this is a book about memory and how we recall the intense moments of our lives. Most writers would reveal the story in long chapters, steeped with descriptions and dialogue, but Boruch offers us something different: the way memories are really revealed.
Marianne Boruch, The Glimpse Traveler, Indiana UP, 2011.
