She does not. Instead of pondering, she, as a latter-day romantic, refuses to analyze. Not even death, of course, frees the writer from words, neither his own nor those of others. Youth is a handicap for the philosophic writer. Halpern writes beautifully, but in this book, at least, she does not appear to have lived long enough to understand that understanding is extraordinarily difficult.
Travel writers are usually solitaries, at least for the duration of their journeys.
Although other people wander in from the margins and furnish the writer's pages with color and anecdote, they rarely become rounded characters influencing the course of the trip. Free to blow in the breeze, the traveler can nevertheless be a lightweight. Apart from family, writing can lack substance, all those rich inner burdens of domesticity. For the familial writer the essay, in contrast to the travelogue, is a more congenial form. Indeed few accounts of family trips are successful, most degenerating into slapstick.