Books
The God of War
“You know who comes out ahead in a war?”
“Who?”
“The ones who believe in the story.”
“What story?”
“The one they tell you to get you to fight.”
The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the Southern California desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances
Where birds fly by day across the desert sky, by night government fighter planes and helicopters make training runs using live ammunition, and an anonymous dead body floats in from the sea. These events inspire Ares, on the cusp of his adolescence, to enact elaborate fantasies of mortal combat. His membership in a troubled family marks Ares as a casualty of a different kind of war. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally handicapped, and his mother chooses not to do anything about it.
Ares' struggle with the burden of responsibility — to himself and others — draws him into a world of drugs, violence, and sex that he is not prepared for, launching him into a very personal battle for his own identity, one that has a lethal outcome.
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No Direction Home
“Blindness will be like this.”
So says ten-year-old Will Burton, trying to reimagine his life in the wake of his father's abrupt disappearance, as his family picks up the stakes and moves to California. At the same time, another boy, Rogelio Alfaro, risks his life to cross the border illegally from Mexico to reach his father, enduring gangs, police roundups, and the pitiless desert. And Marlene McClure, a hard-edged, yearning teenager, leaves her own Midwestern home in search of a father she has imagined but never known. The lives of each of these children and their families converge on a single home in Los Angeles - where the very needs and desires that have torn them apart allow them a measure of hope together. Written with heart-stopping grace and a powerful understanding of the passions that define family, No Direction Home masterfully evokes how far we will go in the name of a place to call home.
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Babe in Paradise
Set in contemporary Los Angeles, this mature debut illuminates lives on the margins of this most duplicitous of cities.
Although all the characters in Babe in Paradise live in Los Angeles, none of them partake of the glamour and success that mark the city. Babe of the title hurtles into a dissolute relationship with a truck driver as a fire engulfs the hillside house she and her mother share. A carjacking forces the young husband and wife of “What I Saw from Where I Stood” to confront the loss of a child and the way in which this loss has reshaped their marriage. In “The Passenger,” a limousine driver finds a baby abandoned in a suitcase, a discovery which exposes her own fragility. The young couple in “Statues,” hell-bent on capturing the Hollywood dream, go horribly off course, landing in a derelict world that lays bare the emptiness of their desires. A mother and her wheelchair-bound son are robbed in “The Thief,” only to find that the thief has stolen more than their possessions. In “Two Criminals,” a man confronts his brother's oncoming death and commits a crime that will ensure his brother's legacy.
The unforgettable characters in Babe in Paradise dwell in the Los Angeles of seismic geological change, of racial unease, of parched desert landscapes littered with the detritus of urban ambition. Marisa Silver has a genius for making us care deeply about her characters, their everyday desperations and hard-won hopes.
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