Rebecca Solnit: Her impressive, artistic and frustrating book

Rebecca Solnit's troubling new book [A Field Guide to Getting Lost] ends abruptly where it should have started, with the author having a frightening flashback about her late father. He had returned home late one night and found a glass of sour chocolate milk on the kitchen counter. Enraged at what he perceived as grotesque wastefulness, he grabbed the glass and ran into little Rebecca's room and thrust the milk on her sleeping face.

Solnit, now an accomplished writer in her 40s, does not allow herself an iota of rage or anger but instead chooses to bask in confusion and muted regret. She rationalizes and analyzes her father's perverse act, donning the cap of a social scientist ruminating on the nature of family loss and disintegration, always careful to couch all experience under the umbrella of some arcane universal "we."

But pain is personal and best understood through the starkness of a single voice, unencumbered by the need to explain itself. Solnit often writes as if she has not yet decided if she is entitled to such a catharsis. Her book of loosely strung autobiographical essays is often more focused on her journey to escape her past rather than excavate it and, in many ways, offers the reader an interesting meditation on the merits of remembering past trauma....