The Seduction of Place

Marisa Silver’s debut collection of short stories, “Babe in Paradise,” is peopled by housebreakers, eavesdroppers, carjackers, baby sellers, pornographers, bad parents and others who consider the social contract optional. And that’s just the humans. Nature adds other transgressors: birds that nest inside houses, rats that hide inside walls, fires that devour homes. In other words, boundary problems abound.

The paradise of the title is Los Angeles, a Los Angeles that’s haunted by the unattainable physical beauty and happy endings of Hollywood yet as populated by ordinary strugglers: a public school teacher, a man who rents out equipment, Hollywood wannabes. Their homes are ill-constructed, flimsy: shabby apartments; a “pitiable warren of rooms”; an advertised “hillside aerie” turns out to be a pale pink shoebox with walls cracked at the seams.

The human body is no more substantial, reliable or well tended; babies are miscarried or born with holes in their hearts or dropped in infancy or transported for sale in suitcases. Bones break, lungs give out, addictions take over, panic overwhelms. In other words, Silver’s world is just like life, only grimmer.

Personal feelings are routinely smothered, ignored or brutalized. In fact, most of the characters in these stories have been so ill-treated by fate, their fellows and/or themselves that they’re understandably skittish, if not completely shut down.

Silver’s women in particular foster no illusions about sex, intimacy or any other human connection--although they often exhibit a dark humor. “Romeo’s here,” says a woman about to go on her first date in years. “Let’s just hope he’s not a complete psycho.” Their relations with men tend to be a confusing mix of desire and revulsion; in love, the female characters are often harsh, dissociated and given to cruelty. In “Gunsmoke,” Alice sleeps with an old boyfriend: “Neither one of us makes a noise or looks the other in the eye,” she says. Mariana in “The Missing” keeps an eye on her beeper during sex. In “Statues,” a young actress, whose boyfriend admires a former porn actress-turned-movie star, impulsively makes her own short porn film--in front of him. At 16, Babe, who appears in three of the nine stories, sleeps with the man who drives the Goodwill truck: “[S]he knew the emotions she had for him were not love, and that someone who encouraged such feelings of disgust and petulant wanting did not love her either.” Later, she’ll kick him in the head with the hard toe of her boot.

Men are often absent, and their absences shape and define many of the other characters’ lives. Babe of the title does not know who her father is, and her mother will not say. In “Gunsmoke,” Alice’s father left his family to become a desert hermit. In “The Missing,” Mariana’s father died when she was young. In “Falling Bodies,” an infant’s father is dead from a rock-climbing accident. These absences, and the silences surrounding them, become irretrievable, missing pieces of the self: Babe, on remembering a man she and her mother mysteriously met in a coffee shop, muses, “I really have no idea about the things that went on in my life.”

On the other hand, several of Silver’s characters redeem themselves by willingly and generously taking on the job of parenting, often for other people’s children--these are the heroes of the collection.

In “Two Criminals,” a dying man adopts the two stepdaughters he’s raised; his younger brother, we understand, will take over for him in the future. The older man in “Falling Bodies,” initially dubious about his alleged grandchild’s paternity, ultimately commits to the child whether the blood bond is real or a lie. In “What I Saw From Where I Stood,” a young couple suffer the trauma of a miscarriage, and it is the husband, Charles, who decides it’s time to try for another child.

Like Denis Johnson’s angelic miscreants, some of these raw, damaged characters are redeemed by the surprising and timely surfacing of compassion, affection or self-knowledge. Babe, in particular, engenders hope and respect: Fatherless, with a mentally ill mother and a knack for finding the worst possible boyfriends, she nevertheless negotiates trying circumstances with liveliness if not always grace.

At times, Silver’s eye can be as cold and judgmental as a casting director’s. She’s hard on physical imperfections, detailing the varicose veins and wrinkles and hollow cheeks of older (45-to 50-year-old) women. Other women have “pancake batter folds of flesh,” nipples “as wide and dark as pancakes” and ill-fitting bras. A man’s age spots are described as “dollops of chocolate,” and “his skin looks like it’s about to peel off in big leathery plates.”

Occasionally, Silver hits a wrong note--a character teaches in “a rough part of Glendale,” for example; where, exactly, could that be? Silver’s prose could also use a good tidying up: There are too many stray words and phrases and gratuitous explanations, and some stories are overly long, with too much dramatized or explained.

That said, the stories are ambitiously and successfully well-structured; Silver is adept at weaving flashbacks into the present action. And at her best--in “The Missing,” “The Passenger” and “Gunsmoke,” the characters are in focus, myth and fact play off each other and the Southern California landscape is convincingly observed.

Other times, Silver’s Los Angeles, with its drug crimes, brush fires and Hollywood desperation, seems too typically apocalyptic, a city borrowed from “Boogie Nights” and “Dragnet” and less familiar--thank God--to those of us who inhabit it day by day.

Silver’s vision cumulatively amounts to a dark, desperate, down-and-out world, a Los Angeles of her own making, where the elusive instances of human connection and hope are all too rare, and therefore all the more luminous. *