In his outstanding debut story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower captures a variety of experience that is as far-ranging as it is close to home. These stories of Viking marauders, teenage girls, and fractured families are violent and tender. They're stories told with the kind of honesty that makes us see our worst selves in the best possible light.
In "The Brown Coast," for example, a man named Bob Munroe wakes up "on his face" with a hurting jaw and a "real discomfort in his underpants." Readers quickly realize that this character's dismal physical condition is only rivaled by his desperate emotional state. Munroe has cheated on his wife, and in their separation he's stuck with the impossible task of fixing up his uncle's ramshackle seaside home.
Munroe is middle-aged, unemployed, and otherwise despicable, but readers will find themselves rallying to his side as he tries to capture a bit of beauty in the form of an aquarium "as long as a casket and three feet deep." In Munroe's efforts to sustain this collection of living creatures, we see our own Sisyphean impulse to build something beautiful only to find it broken, to rebuild it only to watch it break again.
Several others in this collection, like Munroe, are men in the middle of relationship meltdowns. "Retreat" is the story of two brothers united after one of them, a twice-divorced real estate shark, invites the other to visit the cabin he's fortifying in a remote part of Maine. In this setting, childhood rivalries become fresh, blossoming into full-blown adult tensions that aren't so far removed from their infantile origins.
In "Down Through the Valley," the narrator gets commissioned to drive his daughter and his ex-wife's lover home from a retreat center. Given the circumstances, the explosion of rage at this story's conclusion isn't so unexpected. And in "Door in Your Eye," an eighty-three-year-old widower strikes up a friendship with a drug dealer who lives across the street from his divorced daughter. The families in Tower's stories are — if not so much like our own — like those we recognize all around us.
Tower's writing has already garnered significant praise, including two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. Although some of these short stories originally appeared in the likes of The New Yorker, Harper's, and McSweeney's, "a number have been extensively revised" for this book. Tower's stories are gems as individual pieces, and they come together here to form a dazzling crown of a collection.
Tower's writing style is fast-paced and funny, but a dark undercurrent runs beneath even the lighter, laugh-out-loud moments. No one walks away unscathed from his or her predicament, as the collection's title story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" suggests. In this, the book's final story, readers may at first think the shift away from modern American lives to the stuff of Old Norse legends represents something vastly different.
But in fact, we find Tower's Viking characters, Gnut and Djarf and Haakon, slugging it out on the tiny island of Lindisfarne with the same urgency of those living in present-day Manhattan or Charlotte or Mendocino. In "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," we see how people have struggled from the beginning of time to balance their desire for the so-called "mainstream domestic groove" with their want of the reckless freedom that accompanies the sight of "land scooting away with every jerk of the oars."
The most out-there story in terms of time and place, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" nonetheless brings this book's themes together. The story's narrator embarks on a bloody assault of a nearby clan, only to return home with the understanding of "how terrible love can be." He lies awake in bed with his wife, fearing for "those people" — his loved ones — and "the things the world will do to them." Each story in this collection bears witness to those "things," and yet we see Tower's characters — from ridiculed pre-teens to ailing fathers to carnival ride operators — marching forward in their midst.
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