No Direction Home
Inhabiting the uncomfortable space between loss and self-discovery, this debut novel by Silver (after the story collectionBabe in Paradise) tells of missing fathers and the women and children they leave behind. Caroline, whose astronomer husband's departure dredges up memories of her father's abandonment, moves her twin 10-year-old sons, Will and Ethan, cross-country to Los Angeles to live with her parents. Caroline's father, motivated by decades-old guilt, has just hired a Mexican immigrant named Amador to care for his wife, who is quickly succumbing to dementia. Meanwhile, two willful teenagers, Marlene (Will and Ethan's illegitimate half-sister, the daughter of their absent father) and Rogelio (Amador's eldest son), embark on parallel, gritty expeditions in search of their fathers. Silver proves herself a deft juggler of plot lines and an effective realist; she conjures an aching world of half-truths, physical need and emotional frustration. Young Rogelio's adventures underground, in the lawless tunnels under the Mexican-American border, are particularly affecting, as are the struggles of Will, who suffers from a degenerative eye disorder and tries to learn to see the world "from the inside out" by observing his grandmother's mental meanderings. Despite some easy moralizing and overextended metaphors, this is a moving novel, each of its well-wrought characters finding some comfort in the "solace of in-between spaces."(June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.