All biases aren’t created equal. The bad biases, the ones so stupid and illogical and mean-spirited that they blind us to the beauty of the world’s bountiful differences, are obvious: gender, race, ethnicity, religion (or the lack thereof).
But some biases are good. They are guides, teachers, tendencies, inclinations. This became clear to me the moment I began reading “The God of War” (Simon & Schuster), the dark and nearly flawless novel by Marisa Silver that is scheduled to be published this week.
The narrator is a 12-year-old boy named Ares Ramirez. He’s forced to endure a chaotic, ramshackle family life at the edge of a California desert. He is, like most 12-year-olds, a combination of goodness and guile, of selflessness and selfishness. Sometimes he seems like a regular kid, riding his bike and wondering about sex; other times, he’s the oldest man in the world, with so many poisonous secrets piling up inside him that he begins to resemble a nuclear waste site.
Within the first few pages of “The God of War” — which is decidedly not, despite the age of its narrator, a children’s book — I abruptly realized that I was believing everything this kid was telling me. Everything. Because kids never lie? No. Kids lie. We all do. But once he starts talking about his feelings, about the things that happen to him, Ares is stuck in a rut of truth. He can’t climb out of it. He can only follow the sunken path, stumbling and occasionally hesitating, but moving forward, all the while.
Caught in truth’s grip
Maybe it’s like this: Kids can lie, but only about things that don’t actually matter. Once they settle down and start telling you their life stories, they’re helpless. They’re powerless in the grip of the truth. They might fib about stealing a candy bar or finishing their homework — but not about the deep and solemn reality of what it feels like to be them, and nobody else.
Here is what Ares says about his mother, one of those aging-hippie types who repackages her own failures as some kind of principled resistance to bourgeois phoniness: “I was trapped between loving her and another feeling that had recently introduced itself and that I had no name for but that felt alternately like hatred, or disgust, or pity, or worse: longing.”
The more of Ares’ words that I read, the more completely I believed him. I forgot all about that fancy literary device known as the “unreliable narrator.” Ares, I trusted. His perspective was a sudden compass in the unfamiliar world of a new narrative. And I realized, as I thought about other novels, how rapidly and completely I fall under the spell of kids who tell their own stories. It’s not that kids have no axes to grind; maybe my credulity is based on the fact that kids have nothing but axes to grind. You know where they’re coming from. They don’t pretend to any sort of objectivity or feign an evenhandedness, the way clever adults do.
A positive bias
That’s what I mean about a good bias. A positive bias. A bias that makes your mind widen, not grow more pinched and narrow. A bias that leads you out, not in. “The God of War” convinced me that I am endlessly biased toward young narrators. I am biased toward characters such as Scout, the young girl through whose eyes we see the events of “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960). Or the young boy in James Agee’s “A Death in the Family” (1957), the one who remembers the strange gray days following his father’s car accident, or the similarly haunted boy in William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow” (1980). Or the ragtag parade of youthful narrators in Charles Dickens’ novels. Or Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, those stars of the Mark Twain tales that carry their names.
Ares, though, is not the star of anything. He has no tricks up his sleeve. He has a difficult life, with a mostly absent mother. Other adults in his life fail him at regular intervals. He’s in charge of his younger brother, who needs constant care. We don’t know, until late in the novel, the precise nature of his brother’s impairment, but we have this account from Ares: “Just once, I would have liked him to look at me like he really knew who I was.”
Ares, you see, carries a terrible secret. We all carry secrets. Like Ares, we may believe from time to time that we are monsters, and we go through life waiting for someone kind enough to whisper, “Maybe not.”
Author Marisa Silver is scheduled to appear at the baiduhai Printers Row Book Fair, June 7-8. See chicagotribune.com/about/custom/events/p rintersrow for details.
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