EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED: How Wells Tower at least wrote some strong sentences
Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York, 2009
From the archives
Through all nine stories in Wells Tower’s debut collection, my favorite sentence reads: “The place was wild with fields of purple thistle, and when the wind blew, it twitched and rolled, like the hide of some fantastic animal shrugging in its sleep.” That sentence stuns me; it’s the observation of a Viking arrived on a small island to murder, pillage, and otherwise exact vengeance for “dragons and crop blights” allegedly sent “from across the North Sea.” I think there’s a deep understanding of the world in there, in that gentle animation of negative space.
It was five years ago I encountered this, the title story. It knocked me over then, and the easy pathos of Tower’s Vikings remains narcotic. Harald, the narrator, feels separated from his fellow marauders. He wants to start a family with the woman he loves and the juvenile, blood-lusting crew leaves him in a constant state of eye-rolling. The invaders land and make quick work of the island’s resident cleric, who comes to pleadingly deny any responsibility for the blight. Harald’s leader, Djarf, accepts the cleric’s word by way of a double disemboweling: first emptying the belly with a small knife, then performing a ritual called the “blood eagle.” This involves “delicately crunching through one rib at a time until he’d made an incision about a foot long.” Djarf pulls out the lungs through the slits, which flap until the victim dies. As if gathered around the water cooler, Djarf notes: “it’s a pretty wild effect.”
I slipped in a couple other favorite sentences up there. Regardless, you see the sort of visceral tar pit Tower slogs through, an emulsion of ruthless historical pointillism and dialogue plausibly lifted from a night out with my friends. In his best stories Tower establishes an oddness that feels like good science fiction. Even when he’s writing as a 15 year-old North Carolinian girl waking to find a dead baby pigeon on her pillow (from “Wild America”), the description is otherworldly: “It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute.” Delicious.
This is the type of weird mastery that swelled my excitement through those five years since first discovering WellsTower. It’s why after all that waiting I tore into this collection. With the Amazon packaging still raining down in little pieces I awaited a relapse of sorts, a return to the reality the title story altered four years ago. I wasn’t let down, per se, but the high wasn’t quite the same, either. The collections first story, “The Brown Coast,” shares the precision that made me sleeve-tattoo Tower’s name on my arm in the first place (as it were). Take this favorite sentence, for example: “It was eating a coupon.” The context yields its power: Bob, a luckless, jobless, separated, depressed, and displaced antihero calls his wife from a pay phone in an island community he doesn’t really like. She neatly waves off his meager, but honest attempt at reconciliation with a “lawyerly… catalogue of Bob’s shortcomings”—and does so with another man in the room. In that second of silent collapse Bob sees a mouse appear from behind a soda machine eating a coupon. It’s a gigantic moment.
The collection left me shifting and uncomfortable from the volume of tiny cruelties Tower observes—the vermin crawling past the failures. In “On The Show,” the closest he gets to an “Everything Ravaged” sequel, Tower settles into a traveling carnival. The amorality echoes the Vikings as Tower monotonically serves up similarly horrific dualities: single parents falling in love like teens each bring a child on a cheap, perfect date where one child, the seven year-old, is sexually assaulted (at least) in a trailer lot behind a “colonnade of portable toilets.” The criminal isn’t identified or judged. Tower just files away the event between the rigged rides, illegal compensation, and the “lightly retarded” worker named Gary who, looped from a “brown turd” of heroin, dies trying to “collect pocket change and cigarettes” fallen from the cars of “the Zipper, a chain-saw-shaped ellipse with spinning cars instead of teeth.”
Somehow Tower’s collection isn’t particularly grim. He counters his worship of human tragedy with a certain charm. For every “blood eagle” there’s a calm, sleeping animal. I should qualify that Tower’s charm is not a take-home-to-your-mom sort; it’s more of a scientific whimsy, something he evolved to coddle the strangeness of human behavior he devoutly particulates. He shows the good and bad in the same Petri dish, unified by his matter-of-fact-but-placeless language. And though no story reaches that high shelf of complete perfection I found five years ago, I still recommend this. Because Tower elevates every moment he sets his pen to—even the quiet ones—like back in the listless suburbs of “Wild America,” where a stoned teen announces, apropos of nothing and to no one, “A Pringle is a convex paraboloid.”
Now that’s a hell of a sentence.
