IMPATIENT WITH DESIRE

A 45-year-old wife and mother chronicles the Donner Party debacle along the Oregon Trail.

The horrific circumstances of the party’s snowbound months in the Sierra Nevadas during the winter of 1846-47 are well known, but many specifics, including those surrounding the notorious incidents of cannibalism, remain enduring mysteries. Burton (Heartbreak Hotel, 1999, etc.) sets out to imagine and reconstruct those awful last months and to convey them in the voice of someone who was there: Tamsen Donner, who attempted to protect her injured husband George and her five young daughters under inconceivable duress. Told mainly in unsent letters to her sister, Tamsen’s narrative is harrowingly matter-of-fact as she records the ever-rising death toll in the original group of 87 pioneers, details the ever-increasing privations and recounts the ever-more-desperate measures needed to survive. The novel’s strength lies in its evocation of domestic details, but the fiercely loyal marital and maternal love at the book’s heart might have tugged the heartstrings more if the author had been able to resist sentimental anachronistic flourishes. For example, Tamsen, a proto-feminist who has the minister leave “obey” out of her wedding vows, expresses ideas about and sympathy for Native Americans that seem more appropriate to 2010 than to 1846. As a result, the book feels rigged and partisan, a hagiography that happens to be written in first person.

Vividly imagined and well-researched, but rendered in miscalculated tones.