{moszoomthumb imgid=1073 itemid=74 style_m=2}short story writer Wells Tower offers debut collection 

‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’ by Wells Tower
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pages

Wells Tower’s short story “Leopard,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker and is included in his debut collection “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” is the kind of story that easily, graciously, commands attention. Written in the second person, it places the reader squarely in the awkward body and consciousness of an 11-year-old boy suffering two major indignities: an upper-lip fungal infection and a sarcastic stepfather. The former draws the unkind attention of an alpha-male classmate at school, who sets the whole cafeteria to name-calling with one incisive insult (“Even you had to admire the succinct poetry of the line”).

It’s thanks to that insult that you, the protagonist, play sick to save face and stay home from school, only to find yourself in a faceoff with antagonist number two. Unlike other adults, who “have more important things to worry about,” your stepfather suspects your every fib and “will spend days gathering evidence to prove that those are your teeth marks on a pen you said you hadn’t chewed.” Doubting your infirmity, he asks you to walk half a mile to get the mail. You grumble, drag your feet and chuck driveway gravel into the woods, “hoping that those handfuls will cost a lot of money to replace.” On the way home, clutching the mail and a flyer for a lost pet resembling a leopard, you contrive an act of passive resistance of tremendous creativity—and certain failure.

Contemporary fiction, with its hyperbolic blurbs, can prove sorely disappointing: “smart” language can seem smart-alecky, “timely” themes can be heavy-handed, and “sexy” (as in life) can prove shallow. The blurbs on the back of “Everything Ravaged” damn Tower with excessive praise—he’s “blindingly brilliant” and “crushingly funny,” in the words of one Ben Marcus. I didn’t bother with the back cover before I read the book, though. I just opened to the first page, where a character named Bob wakes up on the floor, covered in saltine crumbs.

Tower’s characters might be considered misfits and outcasts, but in the most ordinary ways. The ex-husband with partial custody of his child and a chip on his shoulder against his replacement is entirely familiar. Sibling rivalry persisting well into adulthood is a story many readers know firsthand. These people aren’t freaks. They are, however, unique in their details, and those details of personality are measured judiciously—some writers pile them up as though sheer quantity might lend verisimilitude. Tower trusts his readers to note the details without too much insistence on his part.

There is some redundancy in the descriptions of things, however, as well as some partial overlap. The use of vivid language, while pleasurable when first encountered, feels cheapened when a particular word reoccurs prominently. In the first story, for example, Bob observes that an empty refrigerator exhales a “sour-thermos smell.” A few pages later, a “sour heat” blooms in his stomach. A shrunken ice cube from the freezer tastes “like old laundry.” True and satisfying individually, such metaphors following one after the other, amid otherwise clear and advancing prose, call too much attention to themselves and can take readers out of a story.

We’re also offered an abundance of similes. On one page, the sun “glared down through the gray sky like a flashlight behind a sheet.” Later, within the same story, the sun “looked orange and slick, like a canned peach.” Again, each description on its own feels exact—surprising, yet instantly familiar. And in life, the sun and sky, obviously, do look different from day to day. But there’s little consciousness here of the movement of days. We’re moving, rather, from scene to scene, each providing an opportunity for a new bit of cleverness made possible by the word “like.” Which, in aggregate, can seem “like” one big shortcut.

To be fair, Wells Tower didn’t invent the simile any more than he invented the embittered ex—it’s rampant in contemporary American literature, reflecting a culture in which speed and dexterity are prized more highly, in general, than depth and development. Tower is undeniably a good writer, more skillful than many of his peers. If I was disappointed by the book overall, it’s because in “Leopard”—perhaps since the protagonist is so young and vulnerable—there’s a feeling of greater consequence to the events unfolding, a lingering concern for the boy’s fate. Having read that story last fall, I’d had several months in which to look forward to more of such total engagement. I didn’t find it in the rest of the collection.