BOOK REVIEW : A Woman’s Adventurous Journey : <i> Eli Ginsberg.</i> FINDING SIGNS<i> by Sharlene Baker</i> Knopf $18.95, 243 pages

For years, for millennia, the travel-adventure saga has been the province of men. In ancient times, Penelope never went anywhere. She wove shirts by day and unraveled them by night, waiting around for her famous husband to come home.

Volumes on architecture--even today--often suggest that women “own” the insides of houses, and men “own” everything else. It might even be suggested that when women--freed by birth control--started to write book after book in the second decade of this century, their housebound condition might have accounted for a certain repetitive dullness in so-called women’s lit: When you’re stuck in the house all day, the ironing becomes as important as Boulder Dam.

And what other villain do you know except your husband? Who can rescue you except a lover--or, alternately, a girlfriend? What adventures await you, outside of divorce or heavy redecoration? (The conventional wisdom of our day helps to keep things this way. It’s dangerous out there! Any woman stepping out of her house is asking to be raped, murdered, pillaged, etc.) Best to stay home, to write, as Virginia Woolf once glumly suggested, about the insides of houses.

But here is the opening of “Finding Signs”: “It’s one of my favorite parts of being out here. . . . When the headlights keep streaming past my thumb, and I’m weary from the cold and the dust and the stares, I wait until between cars to slip away from the roadside. . . . I like stepping blindly into the darkness, stomping out a sleeping spot in the cold crunchy grass. Big enough to lie down? Good. Sleep here. No one in the world knows where I am. Not even I know where I am.”

Nice. Very nice. An on-the-road novel by a likable woman, about a likable woman. Very nice indeed.

Brenda is a mere 23. She’s an Army brat who was shuffled all over the country as a kid. Her mom went crazy from the strain, somewhere along the line, so Brenda and her older brother, Will, grew up “homeless” in more ways than one. Now, Will, 29, has been home from the Vietnam War for a while and is extremely despondent and blue. (A flaw in this novel: When does it take place? If it were the actual “present,” Will would surely be older than 29, but nowhere is this narrative placed securely in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s.)

Will drinks to excess, plays Crystal Gayle albums and bets all his money at the track. Brenda does something different. She sets out on a quest for love, but, true to the ancient forms of all quests, what happens on her way is far more important than her destination.

Brenda hitchhikes from San Diego to New England. She goes as far south as Texas, as far north as Wyoming. She works picking apples in the Juan-of-a-kind orchard, tires of it and hauls out on the road again. She crashes a wedding party and discovers, after dancing the night away with all the dads: “Best-kept secret in the world. . . . Middle-aged people, man, they really know where it’s at.” But Brenda, she tells us, is “married to the road.”

Brenda allows herself a few impetuous one-night stands. She drives loads of poinsettias up and down the length of California. She’s in a car crash; she’s roughed up by a gambler in the Biggest Little City in the World. She finds Al Righetti, and someone else, too.

All these adventures aren’t meant to “save” her brother Will. (Except, miraculously, they do.) They are instead the means of cosmically “changing the subject.” Let’s not be morose any more! Let’s celebrate life, and the road. Noble men, adventurous women. Because adventure comes first, and if that road is followed, she’s bound to find true love.

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