Book Review: The God of War
Claire Dederer - International Herald Tribune
Jul 10, 2008
The God of War
By Marisa Silver
271 pages. $23
Simon Schuster
The Salton Sea is a lake, saltier than the ocean, that lies about 85 miles, or 135 kilometers, east of San Diego. Fish and birds flock there for sustenance; they also die there in huge numbers, victims of the lake's high saline content and, some say, its toxicity. A bleak landscape, baking under the remorseless sun of the Colorado Desert, it's a strange, lonesome place. And in her new novel, "The God of War," Marisa Silver has filled it with strange, lonesome people.
The members of a beleaguered little family are crammed into a corroded trailer: a worried 12-year-old boy, his feckless hippie mother and his little brother, who "could not talk or read or write, was more at home with objects than people, and could not look a person in the eye or suffer a stranger's hand on his narrow shoulder." The year is 1978. Silver's narrator, Ares, has a small room to himself, but his brother's breathing and his mother's movements are audible through the flimsy walls. It wouldn't matter, though, if he had all the space - and all the solid barriers - in the world. Ares would still be haunted by an accident that took place when his brother, Malcolm, was a baby: Ares dropped him on his head in a parking lot, causing, Ares is convinced, his brother's present condition.
Don't look for relief from this painful preoccupation in Silver's writing. Offering no shelter, her descriptions are spare, appropriate to her scorched-earth setting. "I heard the thud of his head hit the concrete," Ares says, recalling his brother's fall, "before he rolled lazily off the lip of the island and onto the cracked pavement. He came to rest beside the wheels of the car." Ares's private stations of the cross are described in a stripped- down, relentless fashion. He goes to school, where he has no friends and must defend his brother against everyone, even the special- education teacher who's meant to be helping Malcolm. Ares goes into the desert with his brother, where they play war games and yell at birds, one of Malcolm's only forms of verbal communication. This narrow world opens up a bit when the school librarian begins to tutor Malcolm at her home: while she tries to teach his brother to speak, Ares hangs around her comfortable ranch house, marveling at its normalcy.
Ares's mother has a boyfriend who lives at nearby Slab City, the decommissioned Army base turned squatter's village documented so memorably in Sean Penn's film "Into the Wild."
"The God of War" is preoccupied with an all-too-common subject: one sibling who cares for and feels responsible for another. Silver pairs this subject with a second, the child of a broken household who feels responsible for his family's fractures. These social issues frame and enrich our appreciation of Ares's experiences, but Silver has written a book that's the opposite of a "problem" novel. Far from a polemicist, she lets the details of her storytelling subtly suggest its larger implications.
In "The God of War," seemingly insignificant moments, carefully observed, are used to scavenge value and insight from the neglected and the obscure.
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