Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned Stories by Wells Tower
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
256 pp., $24
The best stories in this debut collection are told--with great warmth, expansiveness, and humor--by men, and they luxuriate in a sort of man-talk that Wells Tower refers to more than once as jawing.
Pungent, playful, crass, good-natured, jawing is above all a code, a way of speaking that aims to establish a rapport and set all parties at ease. The narrator of "Retreat" says of a friend: "He could laugh and drink and murder whole evenings rambling about chain saws, women, and maintaining equipment, and do so in such a way that you never felt there was anything more in the world to think about than these things."
Of course, there is much more in the world to think about than these things, and it's the intrusion of certain less anodyne subjects into their characters' imperfectly circumscribed comfort zones that sets off explosions in these stories, often in the form of brutal violence. But by that point we have already been thoroughly seduced. Tower's stories don't ramble--their action, in fact, sometimes feels too neatly orchestrated--but they roll along in a friendly and accommodating way, in sure-footed and sonorous prose, and they confide in the reader quite frankly.
"Bob Munroe woke up on his face," begins one. "When Jane left me for Barry Kramer, it was a heavy kind of hurt," begins another. Their protagonists are likeable: charming and good-hearted and flawed in ways that aren't too damning. Their action is of the old-fashioned, tension-building, climax-tending sort. They are, above all, stories that are told as stories. This sad and interesting thing happened, they seem to say; let me tell you about it.
Many stories are premised on some sort of escape: The characters are on vacation, or out in the woods, or forced by unkind circumstance to strike off somewhere for awhile. In "Down Through the Valley," which seems to me nearly perfect, Ed, the narrator, agrees to drive the few hours to and from a New Age retreat somewhere in the mountains (the Appalachians, it seems) in order to pick up his young daughter and his ex-wife's new lover, Barry, who has sprained his ankle.
Ed's ex and Barry have gone to the retreat, according to Ed, "to interface with cedar trees and experience cosmic episodes"--just the sort of flimsy nonactivity that releases deep currents of resentment in many of Tower's characters. Predictably, Ed and Barry chafe against each other the moment they get in the car. Barry accidentally tears a patch of vinyl from Ed's car seat with his crutch, and then, in a beautifully incriminating moment, he "looked at [Ed] to see if [he'd] seen it, then gave a guilty wince."
The tension builds as the trio make their way home, and is finally given its due release in a horrific and pitiful scene that has Ed disfiguring a stranger's face, his own daughter a witness, in the parking lot of a backwoods dive bar. The story ends with Ed, beaten up and supine on the concrete, thinking about his ex-wife. She used to have a recurring dream, Ed remembers, that ended with a predatory man looming over her as she lay in bed:
Sometimes the dream would infect me, too. I'd wake up screaming along with her, almost seeing that man with us in the room, knowing just a thin second stood between a hammer or a hatchet and the back of my head. She'd get up, cut the lights on, check the closets, under the bed, and I'd get up and do it with her, and not because she asked me to. When we finally got back under the covers, we'd stay up a long while in the dark, half sleeping, hearts going, conscious of all the places in our house where we hadn't thought to look.
Middle-of-the-night dread turns out to be a motif in this collection, recurring most memorably in the title story, whose last sentence is: "But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home." This is no metaphor: "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" abandons the contemporary out-of-the-way America that is the terrain of its predecessors, for Viking-era Scandinavia. It tells the story of a band of marauders who sail off to re-raid an island they'd all but cleaned out less than a year earlier.
If that sounds like remote stuff, it's Tower's strategy to rein in the subject matter by deploying the same sort of man-talk lyricism, amped up a bit here to jazzy new heights, that characterizes the rest of his stories. Reminiscent of John Barth's snappy reworkings of classical myths, the result is both familiar and defamiliarizing: "My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day. . . . Like me, he wasn't big on warrioring. He was just crazy for boat. He'd have rowed from his shack to his shithouse if somebody would invent a ship whose prow could cut sod."
It doesn't take long before the initial disconnect between language and subject matter fades into the background, occasionally called back to the surface to make us laugh, and it's to Tower's great credit that the characters in this story are just as fully drawn as any of the others in less exotic locales, and the feelings just as potent. His themes, too, are no different here than in his other stories: the vulnerabilities exposed by love, the comfort of friends, the healing power of nature, and, especially, the constant unlocatable menace that lurks beneath his characters' lives.
This menace--a vague threat of violence, a premonition of loss--is palpable in every one of these nine stories, and its presence is largely what elevates this volume to something more than a collection of well-told, affecting anecdotes. Curious, then, that the two stories that feel most saturated by it, "Leopard" and "On the Show," are the least successful. "Leopard" is told in the second-person imperative and "On the Show" in a roving third-person omniscient, and there is something about the literariness of these conceits that, by comparison to the first-person and close third-person of the other stories, feels affected and silly:
Good morning. You have not slept well.
And:
Now it's dark. The sun has slipped behind the orange groves, disclosing the garbled rainbow of the carnival rides.
Grim-faced, they announce their seriousness from the first sentences.
Tower is at his best when he grants his stories a brighter voice. The darkness of his vision--like Flannery O'Connor's, Lorrie Moore's, and John Cheever's--is made both more palatable and more terrifying by the lightness of his prose and the humor of his characters. If his impulse is sometimes too much toward the joke, his jokes are more often than not unnerving and unredemptive: "She was molten in my bed, but she also suffered depressions that were very dear to her. She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth of feeling. I cut it off, then missed her, wishing that I'd at least had the sense to take her naked photograph."
That passage rings both of honest truth-telling and of cruel dismissiveness, and it hints at a loneliness that is the lingering condition of even the least damaged of these characters. Even as it makes us smile, it holds more than a whiff of desperation.
Andrew Palmer is a writer in New York.