No Direction Home: A Novel by
Marisa Silver
Amazing Writing, Fantastic Characters, Wonderful Story
A tensely emotional debut novel of abandonment, loss, and the
unexpected shapes families take to survive. Silver is masterful at
orchestrating her complicated cast of characters and settings….Moving
and resonant.—Los Angeles Times Book Review Blindness will be like
this. So says ten-year-old Will Burton, trying to reimagine his life in the
wake of his fathers abrupt disappearance, as his family picks up stakes
and moves to California. Another boy, Rogelio Augilar, risks his life to
cross the border illegally from Mexico to reach his father, enduring gangs,
police roundups, and the pitiless desert. And Marlene McClure, a hard-
edged, feisty teenager, leaves her own Midwestern home in search of a
father she has imagined but never known. The lives of each of these
families converge on a single home in Los Angeles—where the very needs
and desires that have torn them apart allow them a measure of hope
together. Written with heart-stopping grace and a powerful understanding
of the needs and desires that define family, No Direction Home masterfully
evokes how far we will go in the name of a place to call home. Reading
group guide included.

Personal Review: No Direction Home: A Novel by Marisa Silver
Abandonment, in all its forms is the theme, which ties the threads of this
gorgeously evocative novel together. The characters in No Direction Home
are always on the move, never sure where they're going to end up, but
forever certain that they have to leave.
Converging on a house in North Hollywood, this mismatched collection of
individuals discovers a gradual unfurling of hidden promises, of lives
fraught with conflict and desire. New friendships are forged, old animosities
are conquered, and a fragmented family finally comes together, the
disparate elements becoming an integrated whole.
When her astronomer husband suddenly abandons her, Caroline Burton is
left to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Her twin 10-year-old sons
Will and Ethan are left fatherless, wondering why the man they so
desperately loved and admired vanished so inexplicably.
In a fit of desperation Caroline packs up the car, leaves their Missouri
home, and heads to Los Angeles to stay with Vincent, her distant father,
and Eleanor, her ailing mother. For Eleanor is wracked with dementia, her
mind moving in and out of lucidity, and Vincent, who is now caring for a
woman who "is disappearing as fast as sand through fingers," is finding it
all too much to handle.
Help arrives in the form of Amador, a Mexican illegal immigrant, who
needs a job so desperately. Amador, having left his wife and children back
in Mexico, is eager to make a fresh start in the country to the North, a
country that for him is filled with opportunity. Rogelio, Amador's teenage
son, eventually follows in an effort to find his father, making the illegal and
often dangerous journey from a life in Mexico that has little or no meaning.
Marlene is a teenage girl living in the Midwest. The daughter of Caroline's
absent husband by an earlier woman, Marlene is haunted by the memory
of father whom she never really knew. Feeling an urgent need to at last
connect with him, she travels to Los Angeles thinking that she has finally
tracked him down.
All the characters have arrived at a place and a time when pain and
confusion have softened into a stew of bearable sadness. But there is also
a longing and the hope of vague fulfillment: Only now with the onrush of
dementia is Vincent actually getting to know his wife better. It's a lifetime
that is cleaving open and he is finally being allowed to glimpse inside the
seams and chasms of her past.
Marline can't imagine leaving her whole life up to chance, especially in a
place where nothing happens that hasn't happened a thousand times

before. All her life she's been looking behind her waiting for the rest of her
to catch up. She has no idea what she'll find when she gets to Los
Angeles, but she's willing to take the risk.
Amador is content to remain "a tiny parasite on the back of a cow,"
resolving to lose himself in a city that does not sleep. Sometimes he feels
the world is so big that he is lost inside it, and he's constantly ambushed by
memories of Ruben his first child, who died suddenly, and his wife Erlinda,
left back in Mexico and who is gradually slipping away from him.
Will is gradually going blind. Life is now fraught with sight and shadow -
night will soon become the opposite of day and the objects of the world will
fade into the deep background of his perceptions. Eleanor is the only
person he's met outside of his brother who isn't scared of him. His father
was always constantly angry with him and his mother worries in a way that
makes her overenthusiastic.
Rogelio wants to hurtle across the horizon "like a comet" to find his father
and bring him home. Gangs, hunger, and a life living on the edge are what
lie in store for him, while his mother Erlinda, pines for both husband and
son. Yet Erlinda knows the world is huge and that there is a magic that
exists out of their town of El Rosario, she wants Rogelio to feel the painful
ecstasy of possibility - "she wants to plant in him the seed of yearning."
Caroline is burdened with shame and remorse. She doesn't want to think
about her mother - it's a cavern of guilt and sadness she cannot allow
herself to fall into. Everything - hope and disappointment, relief and despair
have traveled across country with her, packed tightly into her "soda-
smelling car."
Everyone is searching and none of them can predict what lies ahead or
even what direction they will find home. The house soon becomes
overcrowded with people and anger and individual desires, all at cross-
purposes with one another. The characters find themselves adopting a
posture of emotional deafness in order to cope with the awkwardness of
being pushed up against one another's frailties.
Marisa Silver has written a startling and soulful tale, full of richly drawn
characters. No Direction Home maybe about abandonment, but it is all
about love; it's a love that often trips over its feet like an "awkward dancer"
and where you have to bear the dull pain of surprise and hurt. And it's a
story where physical and emotional borders eventually become nothing but
a thought, "nothing but air." Mike Leonard June 05.
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