There are some literary obsessions so magnificent and all- consuming that they require more explication than even a personal memoir can document. They require the paradoxical, truth-seeking amplifications of fiction.

In her new novel "Impatient with Desire," Gabrielle Burton — the former Buffalo-based feminist author who now lives in Venice, Calif. — revisits the unlikely theme that has haunted much of her adult life and career as a writer: Her nearly four decade-long fascination with the life of Tamsen Donner, the proto-feminist matriarch of the ill-fated Donner Party, whose attempted passage to cross the snowbound Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-1847 led to tragedy and the American westward migration's most notorious episode of starvation and cannibalism.

Impatient with DesireBy Gabrielle BurtonHyperion256 pages, $22.99

In last year's "Searching for Tamsen Donner," a well-received addition to the University of Nebraska Press's "American Lives Series" edited by Tobias Wolff, Burton wrote of how a single portentous comment by a former writing instructor at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in 1972 led her through a process of research and serendipitous discovery to uncover a remarkable series of parallels between her own life and that of Donner.

Despite the 130 years that separated them, retracing Tamsen Donner's story and reclaiming her voice became Burton's personal mission, including in 1977 when the entire Burton clan — Gabrielle, her husband, Roger, and their five daughters then ages 5 to 13 — essentially reenacted the journey of the Donner Party from their home in Eggertsville (the Donner family set off from Springfield, Ill.) via the "jumping off" point of Independence, Mo., to California in "Big Red," their late-model Chevy Impala station wagon.

Burton's initial impulse was to encompass the voices of two women struggling in two different centuries to balance their intellectual ideals with the visceral realities of being wives, feminists, and, in both cases, mothers of five daughters, in the form of a quixotic postmodern novel. For many years the manuscript that resulted (called "Nearly Time") appeared as ill-conceived a notion as the Donner Party's own decision to cross the Sierra Nevadas via the now infamous "Hastings Cutoff."

Burton, no less determined and pioneering than her would-be protagonist, went on to write "Heartbreak Hotel," a darkly comedic feminist/surrealist novel that won her the Maxwell Perkins Prize in 1986. She developed an interest in screenwriting, and wrote the screenplay and (with her five fully grown daughters) produced "Manna from Heaven," an independent film shot and set in Buffalo that showcased the magnificence of the then newly restored Shea's Buffalo Theater when it premiered in these parts to much fanfare in 2001.

Despite these successes, her fascination with the life of Tamsen Donner did not fade.

Spurred by her discovery of 17 letters Donner had written to her sister Elizabeth Eustis Poor before and during her journey West, Burton returned to the project with a new idea: essentially, to write two books. The first would be a nonfiction account of her "obsession" with Tamsen Donner and the Donner Party that deftly, and with a darkly comic touch, straddled the ground between straightforward biography and personal memoir. That book became "Searching for Tamsen Donner."

The second book would attempt to apply Burton's four decades of research and her considerable gifts as a narrative artist to reconstitute the voice of Tamsen Donner as a character in a historical novel.

"Impatient with Desire" extends many of the themes Burton introduces in "Search for Tamsen Donner," but does so entirely as subtext and in a 19th century voice that reads like Louisa May Alcott meets Cormac McCarthy — the juxtaposition of a pre-feminist sensibility and its "civilizing" influence brought face to face with unthinkable things human beings will do to one another when their own survival is at stake.

"Think of all the roads a man and a woman walk until they reach the road they'll walk together," Burton writes in the novel's opening line and its first hint that for all of the deprivations and horrors it describes, this is to be, ultimately, a love story.

If it is the ceaselessly intellectual Tamsen who first embraces the idea of "Manifest Destiny" expressed in the westward migration literature, it is her practical and even-tempered husband George who limns out a plan and recruits a traveling party. "I wanted George and the children to go to California because I couldn't go without them," she confesses when it becomes clear that disaster awaits them.

"I think we have achieved as much as possible in an unequal world, a marriage of equals."

In the passage that gives the novel its title, Burton has Donner write her sister Betsey:

"My whole life my heart was big with hope and impatient with desire. When anyone ever went anyplace, I always wondered: What will they see? What is there that is not here? What waits for them that I am missing?"

It is this indomitable voice — lost to history except in fragments — that Burton recovers and amplifies for us here.

As she writes: "Some may think it wrong to fictionalize real people. But the saga of the Donner Party, a real historic event, became embellished and distorted almost immediately, passing into social and cultural myth. Why are we so drawn to it? Because it's the American dream turned nightmare? Because we wonder what we would have done had we been there? We make up stories to try and find explanations for mysteries."

R.D. Pohl is The News' literary blogger; find more from him at ArtsBeat.