false 4 0 false false Tue May 27 10:21:41 -0700 2008 Tue May 27 10:27:15 -0700 2008 By ELLA TAYLOR

On the face of things, Ares Ramirez, the 12-year-old at the broken heart of Marisa Silver’s elegiac new novel, The God of War, is working through a normal adolescence. His body is changing, his soul is torn between belonging and rebellion and he doesn’t know whether to love or hate his single mother, Laurel, with whom he lives in a run-down trailer in the Southern California desert bounded by Mexico and San Diego. But for a boy his age, the pain and possibilities of growing up are complicated by unusual responsibilities. Laurel, who works as a masseuse in a nearby spa, leaves Ares to care for his younger brother Malcolm. Still, the blight on Ares’ life is not Malcolm, whom Ares loves with an inchoate love as protective as it is resentful, but a secret connected with Malcolm that Ares shares only with the reader.

By the time Ares’ guilt has done its work and come to light, you will know him and the other players in his unfolding drama with such intimate specificity and sympathy that the casually contemptuous term white trash — which liberals who would never use the N word toss off without thinking twice — won’t even cross your mind. Marginality is a theme in just about any novel you pick up these days, usually written by and/or about the whiny, alienated children of unhappily prosperous families. Silver gives voice to real outsiders, society’s castoffs who eke out precarious livings around the edges of that other failure, the Salton Sea, a river deflected long ago in hopes of creating a desert oasis for tourists, and now so polluted and oversalinated that it washes up trash and dead fish by the thousand.

“The desert’s plants and animals thrived in seemingly impossible circumstances, against heat and drought and other odds,” says Ares, now an adult looking back on the savage 1978 summer that would shape his family’s future. “The same could have been said of its people, too.”

Read the rest of the review at LA Weekly:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/...
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