Everything Ravaged Everything Burned [Paperback]

Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Wells Tower, born in 1973, is a young American with a strong voice. His debut, a collection of short stories published by Granta this month, is full of vivid images and hard, punchy writing.

Wells' world is one of crushing disappointment and thwarted desire borne, for the most part, by lonely, silent men who are few of word but deep of feeling.

In The Brown Coast, a young man whose life has gone wrong on several fronts takes up an offer from his uncle to do up his uncle's coastal cottage. He finds comfort in collecting sea creatures in an old aquarium. Tower's prose manages to be masculine and gruff yet also hauntingly descriptive:

`The wood paneling in the living room had shrugged up over many moist summers, and now the walls looked like a relief map of unfriendly, mountainous land.'

Towers has a gift for using words in unconventional ways which seem instantly apt: `a stand of pine trees, limbless and spectral', `a jazz of oaths', `a confetti of moths ` around a light bulb.

In Retreat, the mercurial relationship between a pair of brothers explodes and then ebbs into uneasy truces. Their mutual envy and competitiveness threaten to destroy their chances of finding peace and happiness. Tower's language lurks and paints a desolate landscape, adding to the atmosphere:

`...the sunset smoldering behind the molars of the Appalachian range',

` pink insulation lay like an autopsy patient beneath the cloudy plastic sheeting.'

`... would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange.'

`I wanted to get back to spinning the blanket of mindless incident stretched ever thinner across the pit of regrets I found myself peering into most sleepless nights.'

In Executors of Important Energies, a man's father is gripped by a form of dementia. `His store of memories just sprang a rapidly widening leak.'

`Down Through the Valley' is a tale of a journey from hell which a man has to take with his child and his ex-wife's smug new boyfriend. Lured by the prospect of buying a place in his ex wife's good books by doing her a favour, the man is sucked into a series of unfortunate events.

Tower is surprisingly astute when it comes to inhabiting a child narrator. In Leopard, a young boy skives off school, but has to contend with his hostile stepfather. Many unanswered questions are raised including one about the perpetrator of a horrific child murder nearby, but Tower leaves the reader wanting to know more.

In Wild America, a teenager is visited by her cousin who has grown to be a willowy beauty. Her rage and jealousy is powerfully conveyed:

`Jacey could feel the anger coming off her like heat lines on a road.'

And, after Jacey delivers a stinging put-down:

`A collapsed, stunned look came over Maya, as though a piece of crucial rigging had been snipped behind her face.'

Jacey inhabits a world between childhood and adulthood, and the potentially threatening undercurrents of what she's playing with are potently evoked.

On The Show is another chillingly atmospheric story set in the false neon bonhomie of a fairground where an appalling crime is committed. The reader knows that the criminal will never be caught. The claustrophobia of the dingy place and the lives of the various people who have ended up there are illuminated in Tower's grim flashlight.

The last story, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is a tale of Vikings and vengeance narrated by one of the more gentle of the fighters. Towers transposes modern language to this historical set, and this anachronism adds to the jarring, disturbing feel.

Tower is a distinctive voice and his hard-edged, brusque but evocative fiction will undoubtedly win fans.
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For those who only read the first sentence or two of a review, here goes - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, along with Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff (actually, if you like that you'll almost certainly like this) is one of the best collections of new short fiction to hit the shelves in the past few years - go get it.

Tower's collection is taut, thoughtful, extremely emotionally mature and convincing, odd and very much new. I'm amazed that one of my fellow reviewers deemed the stories derivative (as are, according to said reviewer, the stories in the wonderful New Yorker). The roots of Tower's writing do indeed go deep (there are hints and echoes of many greats here), but in the final analysis the stories are his own. Though often concerned with outsiders and their struggles, the stories are varied and compelling in their themes and plots, and brilliantly realised in their language. Tower is a great and edgy new literary voice.

PS. Another reviewer derides the excellent story 'Retreat' for its apparently tired 'climax' where the protagonist shoots and kills a moose on a hunting trip (perhaps deeming it too redolent of Hemingway et al?) . . . I would disagree, however, on where the climax is reached, and would argue that it's with said protagonist's wilful, pride-fuelled, stubborn swallowing of the moose's seemingly infected meat. It's a killer of a story.

These stories remind me of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor and many others, yet they are really very much their own thing. Wells Tower is clearly a writer of the American South, but on the whole he avoids cliche and instead has produced a collection of memorable, sometimes moving stories of a varied cast of characters. I look forward to more of his writing in future - he's a talent to watch.