'The God of War' by Marisa Silver

of War

A Novel

Marisa Silver

Simon & Schuster:

274 pp., $23

"LOVELY ugliness," wrote William T. Vollmann, "this is the Salton Sea."

That melancholy oxymoron just as aptly describes Marisa Silver's new novel, which takes place near the notorious Southern California lake where millions of fish and birds have died over the last several decades. As nearly every observer of the Salton Sea has remarked, the breathtaking desert landscape surrounding the shrinking lake belies its toxicity as agricultural runoff increases its salinity to dangerous levels. Squalor and beauty, corruption and purity, human pettiness and elemental grandeur -- the drama that unfolds in "The God of War," as befits its setting, offers a stark intermingling of forces irreconcilably at odds with one another.

Geography exerts as powerful an undertow in Silver's tale as in a book by Willa Cather or Mary Austin. Landscape is character, and character is fate. Ares Ramirez, the 12-year-old at the novel's heart, has been raised in a trailer by his mother, Laurel, with his half-brother Malcolm, who is mentally disabled and cannot speak. The boys, six years apart in age, have never met their fathers. Laurel, fiercely independent, suspicious of outsiders and sensual, embodies the spirit of her rugged home: "She possessed the sea as though it were another of the half-orphaned children she had collected around her like Malcolm and me, the crippled fragments of the earth she had chosen to keep close while rejecting all the rest," Ares says. "For the sea was a castoff, too."

As a mother, however, Laurel seems desperately adrift. To Ares, she can be cruel, inattentive and disastrously uncommunicative. Her relationship to the younger Malcolm, by contrast, is one of nearly primitive communion. Refusing to speak of him as disabled, she is scornful of medical and psychiatric diagnoses -- "Labels are for boxes," she tells Ares, "so you never have to look inside them." Paranoid about institutional intervention, she resists efforts to send Malcolm to treatment. But it is Ares who must care for his half-brother, and this role pulls him in conflicting directions within a tight circuit of primary emotions: anger, humiliation and fear.