'God' Bares California's Underside

If we didn’t know any better, we’d probably think California is the most glamorous place on Earth. Since the time of the Mamas and the Papas—earlier, probably—we’ve been dreaming of California, and shows like “The OC” and “Californication” have only served to whet our appetite for the excitement of the Golden State.

But behind the mysterious allure of California exist hundreds of thousands of people leading unglamorous, decidedly un-chic, and unnoticeable lives. They are the California we don’t see on TV or hear on the radio, the California that isn’t L.A. gangs engaged in epic shoot-outs or Hollywood starlets prancing extravagantly down Rodeo Drive or high-powered tech start-ups revolutionizing Silicon Valley. They are the abandoned, the alienated, the forgotten peoples of the West Coast. The California we see in the works of author Marisa L. Silver ’82 depicts these people.

For Silver, a filmmaker-turned-writer, it is natural to explore this hidden, lonely side of California. The director of a number of motion pictures, including “Old Enough,” “Vital Signs,” and “He Said, She Said,” Silver has long been turning an inquisitive, critical eye on her surroundings. Her literary debut, a collection of short stories entitled “Babe in Paradise,” is situated in contemporary Los Angeles and recounts a number of painful narratives in which individuals are faced variously with a car-jacking, a house fire, and an abandoned baby. In her first novel, “No Direction Home,” Silver explored the search for meaning and a sense of “home” in Los Angeles, tracing the lives of children who come from across the country to live under the same roof.

But it is in Silver’s troubled yet intruiging new novel, “The God of War,” that she takes the greatest risks, stepping back in time and place to a rural Southern California town in 1978 where military planes and water pollution punctuate the arid desert landscape. Tracing a few months in the life of 12-year-old Ares Ramirez, who lives with his mother and his mentally disabled younger brother Malcolm in a trailer home by the sea, the story is one of alienation and self-discovery. Ares’ childhood and family life are unconventional; his mother eschews the “labels” of psychologists and doctors who would classify Malcolm as “handicapped,” forcing much of the burden of caring for Malcolm, who doesn’t like to speak or be touched, to fall on young Ares.

In many ways, “The God of War” is the tale of Ares’ coming-of-age. Under the weight of his responsibilities, Ares finds himself totally alone: isolated from his brother, who barely acknowledges his presence; isolated from his mother, who is busy with a rocky relationship and another pregnancy; isolated from his classmates, who think of him as the “brother of the retard;” isolated from other adults who criticize his mother’s parenting. In an effort to find himself, Ares experiments with rebellion and turns to a new friendship with Kevin, a boy just released from a juvenile rehabilitation center. Ultimately, Kevin ends up dead and Ares takes the blame for a murder he did not commit, all to save the brother whose care he once resented.

As far as coming-of-age tales go, “The God of War” is no “Catcher in the Rye.” Ares’ developmental transitions seem sudden and uninspired, and his experiences with puberty and teenage angst seem trite, almost cliché. After the story’s climax, when Ares covers for Malcolm’s fatal mistake, the novel’s narrative structure takes a dive. Years of Ares’ life are hastily, awkwardly summarized in a handful of pages, and Silver never fully explains the impact of Malcolm’s mistake on the two brothers and their relationship. She tries to force a sense of completeness on the narrative and attempts to give her reader a satisfying ending that leaves no questions unanswered. But this ending tells us only what Ares did with the rest of his life, not how he experienced them. The rushed exposition of the ensuing two decades hardly completes a novel that has spent 200-odd pages depicting a few months of feelings for a confused 12-year-old boy.

Still, what Silver does best is paint a picture of an isolated, lonely existence. All of the characters in the novel are in some way alone. Ares’ mother struggles to raise two children and pay the bills all on her own. Kevin struggles to find a sense of self in a foster home where he feels out of place. And Malcolm is the most alone, unable to communicate with those who love him and unable to understand much of the world around him.

The town, too, is isolated: it is not too far from the city of San Diego, but it is far removed from the minds of those who live in that city. The characters and the settings of Silver’s novel are the ones that have been forgotten by modern literary America. We like to think of rural California the way Steinbeck painted it—majestic and a little wild. But we forget that Steinbeck’s stories were filled with loneliness. He first presented what Silver has rediscovered, a rural California that is dusty, deserted, and a little lost—just like its inhabitants.

While Silver’s narrative is not particularly intriguing, her portrayal of life on the outskirts—in a marginalized family in an isolated town—is refreshing. These people and their lives are not so outlandish as to be only conceivable in the pages of fiction. It is not difficult to imagine Ares and Malcolm as two real boys in Southern California; perhaps the novel is best read as a reminder that there are alienated people in alienated places with stories worth hearing—even if that story isn’t particularly well narrated.

—Staff writer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.