Customer Reviews

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I started to read this book skeptically, but from the first story found myself completely disarmed. My favorite stories are "Retreat" and "Wild America," both gorgeously unexpected treatments of their subjects (in the first, sibling relationships, and in the second adolescent girls and sexual discovery). Nothing I could say about the way Wells Tower goes into his stories could possibly prepare you for the surprising pleasures of his language. He's always funny without sneering or being self-satisfied in his conclusions regarding this big messy thing, "American culture." He's sly and humble. But his sentences--the core of any literary enterprise as far as I'm concerned--are at the crux of his art. Carefully wrought, they approximate the uniqueness and the varieties of personal experience. And did I mention how funny he is? Anyone who cares about word choice or a fresh eye trained on the observations he makes (in the tradition of Joy Williams or Richard Yates, say) will read them aloud more than once and chuckle. Beautiful.

This is amazing writing; haunting and memorable. I eventually had to put the book down though; I couldn't take that much pain time and again in so short a period.

These stories are extremely good, but the reviews in the NY Times are too laudatory. The writing is spectacular in many places, pop-culture generated grammatical slips aside in a few spots, and the voice is strong.

I found a low level of emotional depth in most of the stories and I was surprised by the experience given the writing.

The stories delve deep, elicit emotion and resolve by leaving you wondering at the awkward alignment of symbols meant to replicate 'real life.' More than that, the sentences are crisp and clear, the narrator's eye taking notice of details of the emotional and, mostly, physical landscape of the characters that everyone misses in ordinary life. This is Modern American Fiction at its best, and yet it begs a question: Wasn't there some sort of revolution long ago in the arts that America's ivory-tower fiction dispensaries (ie, MFA programs) try so hard to ignore? Namely, just as in painting we now laugh at how a Van Dyke lets every ruby and thread on a garment shine, and feel more comfortable when Manet blurs the figure--which is closer to how we see the world--shouldn't the perfect alignment of symbols and the noticing of all details that these stories, and so many others, present, bother us? It certainly bothered me. Don't get me wrong, the stories show a smart, insightful, sensitive, industrious author at work. But it's exactly this banal American industriousness, this cleverness and ego in getting everything 'right', that's so irksome. Not that fiction should be riddled with error, recklessness or a lack of control, but that authors should risk something, make a reader feel like the story could implode, challenge us. These stories do none of that. They're perfect, like butterflies preserved under glass. I enjoyed looking at them. I enjoyed getting away from them and breathing some fresh air far more so.

I think the book is good, I enjoyed it. But the editing is awful, it is full of erratas, split words, missing spaces, etc. It has not even been put through a spell checker. I imagine this only happens in the Kindle version, which makes me even sadder. Sorry Amazon, really poor job.

Based on the reviews I'd read, I was expecting the next coming of Cheever or Carver. Well...not exactly. Tower may show promise, but he's not there yet. Of these nine stories, I'd say about two ("Leopard" and the title story) were memorable or compelling. The rest, despite being technically accomplished and polished, fell flat. If you look at early Updike, you see a talented writer, however raw, writing with feeling about people and situations that he knows intimately. Here, I hate to say it, you have a hipster slumming it, writing about people and situations that he knows nothing about, writing about people on the fringes not because he knows them or has any particular interest in them, but because that's fashionable and will get him published. Consequently, the results feel forced, and you get vague characters, stories that don't seem finished, and dialogue that's often stilted and clumsy. At one point, Tower describes the color of a lake as being like "new blue jeans". Huh? That's a description that means nothing, and stopping to think about it took me out of the story. Similarly, in "Retreat", two brothers have a relationship that we're told is strained, yet the action that takes place does nothing to resolve or explain that situation, and shines no light on the characters themselves. You get a lot of incidental male-ness (hunting, field dressing, carpentry, pick-up trucks) that isn't illuminating, doesn't advance the story, and feels extraneous. And not once, but twice, in two separate stories, he uses wand as a verb...a nice trick, but nothing more. I will say this, though: the title story is well-written, well-paced, satisfying, original, and full of creativity. If only more were like it.

I agree with another review here: The Times really piled it on, and made me expect the second coming of Cheever and Chekov combined. The stories were solid and unique but far from outstanding. I found them long on punchy word choices but short on depth. For example, bugs stuck to a truck's grill are "stuccoed" there; rather than waving an object in somebody's face, a character "wands" it, which isn't a verb and doesn't really make sense except by association, calling to mind the waving of a wand. The stories are long on these snappy stylistics, and short on emotional depth and glaringly lacking in demonstrating any real understanding of human emotional complexity. I'm not levelling that at Tower himself, but at the narratives. Everything about the characters is shown, or attempted to be shown, through action, props, events, and dialogue. This is not a technical fault, because plenty can be accomplished that way, but there is little richness between the lines. What do his bumbling, dysfunctional Floridian carnies feel? We don't know. The narrator doesn't know. Does Tower know?

The first story is the strongest. "On the Show" really baffled and even embarassed this reader, calling to mind the hallmarks of amatuer fiction so often encountered in workshops: episodes, events, and people connected by physical promixity but otherwise disunited by any thematic thread. It's the writers job to do a little bit of weaving, and that has been forsaken or skipped here. "On the Show" has an ending in which the material just stops, seemingly because the author ran out of stuff to have happen. The last sentence is a nutty image, like the dozens and dozens of images provided along the way, and the last one has no special resonsance for being the last. It reads like that Beck song on "The Information" where the drums just stop and the guitar strums a few more chords, and then you hear Beck at the soundboard answering a call from someone in the house: "What? Dinner? Oh, okay." Silence. Tower did his thing along the way, showing people sexually abusing a child, smoking herion out of tinfoil, being large like a giant, having a disagreement with a step-father. Hope you liked it, because that's what it was.

A lack of compassion for his characters and narrative ungenerousness from an author I find distasteful, especially when there is evidence of effort and intention in the quirky words choices. But in a barren emotional context, these verbal oddities come to seem like decorations in an empty room.

I read no reviews prior to reading this. A friend just handed it to me, said it was good. I'd rank it pretty close to terrific. Tower's writing is relaxed. I have a low tolerance for showy writing. The stories here come across as earnest, heartfelt and gritty. It seems to me that Tower puts far more emphasis on character work than wordsmith wonders. Yes, there are occasional flashes of nifty imagery but it's within bounds, within the framework of the story. "I looked in the rearview. Barry had his good foot propped on the back of Marie's seat. His pants were hiked up, showing a shin about as big around as a deer's leg, and covered so thickly in coarse black hair you could have hung a toothpick in it."

The amount of information Tower imparts in a few short brush strokes is remarkable. I'm not sure I can pick a favorite but enjoyed "Retreat" immensely for the tense relationship between the brothers and "Wild America" for capturing female teenage ennui. For the most part, the characters are on the down-and-out side but Tower finds their heart in each and every case. The title piece is a curveball about Vikings pillaging and worse. Coming last in the volume, it made me reflect back on all the brutality in our own world and how we are capable of quickly rushing to judgment. If you enjoy short stories as the occasional palate cleanser to a deep novel, the nine pieces in "Everything Ravaged" might be just what you need.

Wells Tower's first book is an interesting collection of stories showcasing a wide range of contemporary urban America. Tower shows his depth of character voices by writing from the varied points of view of disaffected young men, confused young boys, troubled teen girls, humourous old men, and medieval Vikings. This last one is the story to get peoples' attention, the gimmick, but is in fact the weakest. Tower's strengths are in contemporary settings and complex relationships. Most of the stories hold your attention but some of them were let down by "Literary" pretensions.

For example, in "Down Through the Valley", the finale is the narrator getting into a fight in a bar's parking lot. Just before he throws a punch though he remembers a dinner party! Then the fights over. Have you ever been in a fight? I promise you, these moments of Literary pretention do not happen. The climax of "Retreat" is the shooting of a moose while "Executors of Important Energies" has a son visiting his father who has Alzeheimer's. I've read several stories which have both devices as major components of the story. It's what makes a story "worthy" of critical acclaim and reeks of self import.

"Wild America" is the only story here that really stands out for it's originality. Two cousins, once great friends, find they've grown apart in their teen years. A trip to the woods ends in a deeper rift between the two and, for one of them, an encounter with a strange man. This is probably the best story here. Measured writing, pitch perfect characterisation, and convincing dialogue, rolled up in an interesting story.

The other stories are readable but by no means different from any other stories you're likely to read in literary journals like McSweeney's, The Paris Review, or The New Yorker. That is, they're ok but forgettable.

It's an enjoyable collection by a good writer, on his way to becoming a great writer. Hopefully he'll stray from intentionally oblique endings that plague literary journals and write better stories. I'll definitely check back in when he writes another book though this one was filled with so so stories and not the dynamic ones you'd imagine from the advertising.

At first I thought it might just be a question of a particular character's limitations reflected through a story's voice, but the same dull, crude thinking recurred. There are other more or less young male short story writers out there who are infinitely more interesting and less madly overhyped. Aleksandar Hemon, Peter Cameron, and Richard Lange, for instance, all seem to have much more interesting minds.