BULLETINS TO AND FROM A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

Author: By Chris Bohjalian

Date: SUNDAY, March 8, 1998

Page: E2

Section: Books

Arguably, my parents' time would not have been any worse spent if they'd simply thrown in the towel on -- for example -- Charles Reich's rhapsodic appreciation of flower power, ``The Greening of America,'' and then convinced the assembled group to throw their car keys into the punch bowl to swap spouses a la ``The Ice Storm.'' Certainly the ensuing conversation wouldn't have been any sillier.

While some terrific books about the era emerged from the 1960s and early 1970s, there were many books that were so earnest and goopy that today they are just plain unreadable.

Now with her 12th novel, ``Where the Road Goes,'' Joanne Greenberg has attempted to revisit that world where cause with a capital C and movement with a capital M mattered. This is the story of Antigone ``Tig'' Warriner, a 62-year-old part-time librarian who leaves her family in Colorado (where Greenberg also lives) to join a cross-country walk for the environment 40 years after she was a part of the civil rights movement in the South, and 30 years after she was arrested multiple times for protesting the Vietnam War. The walk will take one year, leaving Fresno, Calif., in March, with the goal of reaching Woods Hole on Cape Cod by the following spring. The walk begins with 100 intrepid souls, but Warriner knows there will be attrition. Because the notion of a 62-year-old deserting her husband and family for a year to walk the nation from ocean to ocean is more than a tad loopy, Greenberg's characters frequently theorize why Tig has chosen to go.

``I think you really believe The Walk is your last hurrah,'' her husband, Marz, tells her. ``No jail this time, no civil disobedience, no admonitions from platforms. Most urgently, you wanted to know if you could still make such a walk.''

Tig believes she has gone because, as the 1990s wind down, she is still searching for the feelings she experienced briefly in the 1950s and '60s and '70s:

``I knew the joy of happy, cooperating friends who liked one another, who had lives and work and jokes beyond the Cause and who were . . . gladsome, I think is the word, gladsome together.

``I realize now that this was a great part of what led me to join The Walk. I thought that when we had stripped down to the basics, pared away comfort, houses, cars, TVs, VCRs, we would befriend one another on the deeper levels of soul to soul in a group enterprise that would make us a body, a we.''

``Where the Road Goes'' is full of this sort of sugary sincerity, though in all fairness that may be a part of Greenberg's design. Tig is an aging protest soldier, out for her last crusade, and her language might indeed be informed by ``gladsome'' hopefulness. Nevertheless, the tone grows thin fast.

The book chronicles the fortunes of the walk, and the battles the group has with weather, theft, and dissension. But it also explores the nature of the Warriner family, and the chaos that Tig's kin are forced to brave back home. Her teenage granddaughter falls blindly in love with an alcoholic Native American, and becomes pregnant with his baby. Her divorced daughter must watch a wrenching custody fight for the children of one of her next-door neighbors: The man is gay, and years after he and his wife have separated, she has come back for their boys.

Tig's teenage grandson grows increasingly involved in the model city he is building in the basement of his home, and her husband, a civil engineer, decides in his mid-60s that he, too, has every right to one final career change.

In some ways, Greenberg is the perfect writer to plumb the effect of a life lived for protest as old age approaches and the ``causes'' have become more ambiguous. She writes fiction that is, if nothing else, earnest -- but, in the past, likely to be layered with insight and irony. Among the issues she has already explored in her work are public education (``No Reck'ning Made''), deafness (``In this Sign''), and madness, (the best-selling ``I Never Promised You a Rose Garden'').

Alas, ``Where the Road Goes'' is so heartfelt it's deadly. It isn't bad enough that Tig with a straight face can use the word gladsome; she's named her kids Justice and Solidarity. (Justice, in turn, has named her daughter Hope.) Moreover, Greenberg has made her task as difficult as possible, choosing to tell Tig's story through the letters she writes to her family back home and receives from them on the road.

And while some of the letters and voices are beautifully rendered, there is an inherent implausibility to the notion that three generations of Warriners will write daily letters to one another in the 1990s. Let's face it: Her grandchildren are in high school, and high school students in this day and age can barely pen an 11-word thank-you note for a birthday present. They certainly don't scribble letters with the fervor demonstrated by Tig's idealistic granddaughter, or her deeply introspective grandson. This pair makes Alcott's March sisters look like epistolary slackers.

Nevertheless, lurking somewhere in the reams of correspondence is a gripping family story. It's clear that Hope's love is doomed, but just how horrid the outcome will be is unclear until the very end. And while the other subplots are inherently less dramatic, Greenberg still manages to drive the narrative forward in spite of its extraordinarily cumbersome structure.