Author’s PC has a zoom lens

Marisa Silver’s home near Lake Hollywood has the feel of a sanctuary. Out back, the hills heave like an elemental landscape, tangled with thickets of growth, brown and dusty green. Beyond the front door, a basketball hoop awaits the author’s sons, ages 7 and 11, while inside a pair of Labrador retrievers vie for attention, tussling across the floor.

For all that, though, the house is calm, the decor spare and full of space. A dining area occupies one side of an expansive living room; on the other side, a couch fronts a large coffee table, all sharp angles and uncluttered clarity. The same language might be used to describe Silver, who, wearing jeans and a blouse, blond hair cut above the shoulders, talks with hushed urgency about her first novel, “No Direction Home.”

“It was a huge challenge,” she says. “It was great, but it was frustrating in the beginning because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was feeling: How do I do this? How do I write a book?”

That, of course, evokes the floating quality of writing almost perfectly, the way, each time out, an author must develop not just a story but a way to tell it, reinventing his or her own process, as it were. It’s a solitary exercise, interior and self-directed, which is both its difficulty and its appeal. “I like very much the intense individuality and aloneness of writing,” Silver declares succinctly. “I love being by myself. And I love being quiet.”

This sense of silence, of stillness, defines Silver’s fiction, which traces, for the most part, the transmigrations of the heart. Her debut effort, the 2001 short-story collection “Babe in Paradise,” examines the delicate tensions of love and family, the inevitable disappointments of not getting what you want. Similar issues motivate “No Direction Home” (publishing next week), which brings together characters from different backgrounds, establishing a commonality in their loss.

There is Amador, an illegal immigrant who fled Mexico to escape his guilt over the death of his infant son. Vincent, a failed and aging actor, who hires Amador to care for his wife, Eleanor, as she slips into dementia. At the heart of the novel are three children: Vincent’s 10-year-old twin grandsons, Will and Ethan, who suffer from progressive eye disease, and Marlene, a teenager who gravitates to the family’s small North Hollywood house as she searches for the father she’s never known.

*

A literary collage

It’s a lot for one narrative to encompass, but Silver mitigates -- while also mirroring -- her characters’ dislocation by shifting point-of-view among them, creating a novel that reads like a collage. Lest this seem like a short-story writer’s way of taking on the long form, the reality is more complex, Silver suggests.

“I didn’t approach it as short stories,” she says. “That’s just how my brain works. I don’t have ideas that go linearly from A to Z.” Before sitting down to write, in fact, she spent “a good six to nine months reading,” to try to teach herself how a novel worked. “Short stories,” she explains, “are so much about compression. You start in the middle, and you end before they end. So I wasn’t trying to weave together a bunch of stories. I had these thematic notions and the multiple plot lines reflected back on them. It’s sort of like a fugue.”

If “No Direction Home” is a fugue, it’s a fugue on a particular motif. Like the stories in “Babe in Paradise,” Silver’s novel is steeped in a ground-level vision of Los Angeles, the at times jarring disconnect between what the city promises and what it is. “Something is different about this place,” Will observes upon arriving from Missouri. “The clue to the difference, he decides, is the color of the trees and the bushes, which is a weather-beaten version of the deep, trusting greens of the forest behind his old house.”

Such a dichotomy, Silver believes, has everything to do with how the city gets inside us, with its sensibility. “L.A.,” she says, “is ripe with things that have been abandoned. There’s a loneliness out here. I grew up in New York City, so I feel a separateness; you don’t have to be among people unless you choose to be.” At the same time, Los Angeles lingers as a vivid dreamscape, a place of mythic potency.

“People bring a lot of hope when they come to L.A.,” Silver says, “and it’s sometimes realized and sometimes not. That leads to an interesting situation, for people to invest in a choice and have it work out differently from how they imagined. How do they adjust?”

Certainly, this is true of Amador, who shares a trailer with several men and sends money home to Mexico, or Vincent, a washed-up actor in a city full of washed-up actors, teaching improv to pay his bills. In a very real sense, both men are archetypes, but for Silver, that’s part of the draw.

“I’m not scared of archetypes,” she says. “The challenge for me is to always root it in a person’s absolute specificity.”

Such specificity is a key to Silver’s aesthetic, which relies on small, intimate moments to develop character and narrative. “No Direction Home” is, in many ways, a book about blindness, both literal and otherwise, how we cope with what we cannot see. For Will, this is physical -- his eyesight is failing -- while for his grandmother, the blindness is interior, obscuring memory.

Either way, the novel finds a kind of grace in the notion that, for better or worse, we must make a reckoning. “I don’t think things are resolved,” Silver says, “and I certainly don’t think everybody is happy. But people find ways to make it to the next step. Some of those ways are burdensome. You carry your loss with you. But humans are resilient. There’s something about living that pulls us to the next moment. And in the next moment, we figure out what we can bear.”

Nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to parents and children, who daily break apart and come together in a million microscopic ways. “It is impossible to get Ethan to hug her anymore,” Silver writes of the boys’ mother, Caroline. “Now Will. So that’s it, she thinks. You get ten years to touch them, ten years during which they must be the helpless recipients of your need to love. And then it’s over.”

For Silver, what’s compelling about these relationships “is the reciprocal need. If you look at the need of children, it’s so bare and raw. And in a funny way, parents too have a similar need. You’re raising your children, but part of what you’re doing is letting them go. And for children too -- they have to let you go, and that’s a complex and difficult thing to do. So much of their rage and anxiety comes from this sense that they’re going to let you go, but they’re not quite ready.”

*

Sharing space

There’s an almost visual quality to Silver’s exploration of these issues, with characters defined by gestures, by their mien. “When I write, I am in that room with those characters. Even though I can’t act, I think it’s like acting, and you have to be right there with them and feel the heat or coldness in the room.”

That’s a revealing comment, for prior to becoming a writer, Silver had a successful career in film. In 1985, after dropping out of Harvard, she moved to Los Angeles, where she directed several features, including “Permanent Record” (1988) and “He Said, She Said” (1991). By the mid-1990s, however, she found herself eager for something else.

“The more I made films, the less I was telling stories I wanted to tell....It was really exciting to sit in a room and write my story my way,” she says.

Still, the aesthetics of film can’t help but find a way into Silver’s writing, from her collage-like style of narrative to her penchant for the telling detail that casts a character’s inner life in stark relief.

“When I write, I look at scenes as though I were a camera. It’s not conscious, but if I stepped back, I’d say, ‘I’m looking at a close-up now, I’m looking at a long shot, I’m describing a wide shot.’ If you deconstruct the experience of writing, you’re moving around the scene in very much the way you would be with a camera. You’re deciding on a point of view.”

Strategies like this are hardly uncommon; many writers have been influenced by movies. For Silver, though, the connection seems more elemental, emerging from her stance within the world.

“Take this room,” she says. “There are certain ways I see it all the time. But” -- she points to a small area behind the dining table -- “I almost never visit it from that corner. Sometimes, when I’m stuck, I go there, and it sounds ridiculous, but it’s a different world.

“Part of what’s hard about any artistic process is that you get rooted in certain habits. One of the challenges is to find a different way of seeing, so I’m surprising myself, and not writing something I already know.”

*

Reading, signing

Where: Dutton’s Beverly Hills Books, 447 N. Canon Drive

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Contact: (310) 281-0997