by Wells Tower(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)
Hardcover, 238 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology
ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE
From the Cover: Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.
This collection contains the following stories: “The Brown Coast,” “Retreat,” “Executors of Important Energies,” “Down Through the Valley,” “Leopard,” “Door in Your Eye,” “Wild America,” “On the Show,” and “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.”
My Review: This is another recommendation that I got because I listen to the Slate Political Gabfest. Every week the contributors each give their “Cocktail Chatter”—the one thing they’re going to chat up over the weekend (and you can talk up by proxy) and a couple of weeks ago David Plotz chattered about this book, and his description of the title story—about Vikings-cum-middle-managers—was so intriguing that I had to pick it up. Luckily one of my local libraries had ordered it, and I was the first to check it out.
Let me get this out up front: I love short story collections. There is nothing better than sitting down and reading through a complete story, beginning to end in one sitting … and maybe even finishing three or four of them if you get lucky and have some real uninterrupted time.
I ground right through these stories, they’re that short … but by no means equate “short” with “easy” or “simple.” These are some very complex stories. For example, “Executors of Important Energies” is one of the shorter entries in the collection, and yet it is a very complex story about the relationships between a father suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and his wife and his son as they try to go out for a nice dinner. It is every bit as stressful as it sounds, and it is masterfully written.
I also had a very interesting experience with Tower’s stories (and doesn’t that name sound like a pseudonym?). The story “Leopard,” is written in second-person perspective (“You got up, you looked in the mirror, you saw your hair” etc., etc.) which is a voice that I DO. NOT. LIKE. AT. ALL. I have written about it in a review in this blog before and I was not kind. (these were my exact words: “It is my personal opinion that this sort of writing is better served penning true confession stories and letters to Penthouse Forum, rather than actual fiction (popular or otherwise)” and much to my eternal consternation the author of that particular story commented on my review (in a comment that was, looking back on it now, rather passive-aggressive)). However, you all saw an “however” or a “but” coming, didn’t you? However, Tower managed to make me completely forget the fact that the story was told in second-person and got me involved in the story. It was actually two or three paragraphs into the story before I realized that it was told in second-person, so … kudos to you Mr. Tower.
The stand-out piece in the collection is, as David Plotz chattered about, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” which is a Viking story that turns everything you think you know about Vikings on its head. Tower’s Vikings are more or less “weekend warriors” who would rather stay at home, working on the house or futzing about in the garden than going and raiding the nearby monastery. It is a very compelling look at what is a traditionally macho stereotype.
This is Tower’s first short story collection, and I am eagerly awaiting his next, whenever that may be, because Tower is an exciting find. As some of you may or may know, I am this September I am headed up to Western Washington University to get my Masters in Literature and eventually headed on to get my doctorate with the intention of teaching literature somewhere and honestly, as I was reading Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned I was thinking of how I could incorporate it into a class on the Contemporary American Short Story. I guess once I turned that part of my brain on it’s hard to turn it off.
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