Nothing Salvaged, Nothing Doused

(a review of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower)

I went to see Wells Tower read in Bryant Park one afternoon. It turned out to be just a moderated Q&A session with two other authors. As he responded to the queries, what immediately became clear was that Wells thinks a lot. He spends a great deal of time in his brain, choosing his words carefully. He has a big forehead, and in response to each question, he’d tilt it down, further intensifying the glare, a scribe looking up from his dusty tome, over the glint of his glasses. Wells wears no glasses.

How does a guy in button-down plaid, Chuck Taylors and jeans come across with such an air of authority? He must read a lot. Not just short stories and the classics, but dictionaries, manuals and encyclopedias. It’s apparent in his work, rife with obscure terms and jargon privy only to the experienced. He possesses acute, technical knowledge, and his readers instinctively trust his grasp of internal workings.

But this is the work of a fledgling sage. His stories have an unpolished feel, an unrefined edge that suggests an apprentice albeit, a precocious one. His stories hinge on obvious literary devices and conceits. The mechanisms are without guile, thinly veiled like a clear-faced watch, and any reader can plainly see how a Wells Tower story tick. The strategies could be taught with diagrams in a writing class to exemplify the tools needed to shape a story.

The collection is varied and eclectic: a man caught cheating on his wife sorts things out in a remote shack, finds kinship with a sea slug; a divorced man somehow gets roped into chauffeuring around his ex’s new husband; a newcomer to carnie life becomes suspect of raping a young boy; a Viking reluctantly leaves his woman home to pillage a distant town and save face in his community. These tales, despite their differences, share a common thread by following disenfranchised characters as they seek passage through misfortune and alienation. Wells writes of people who've lost their footing. They try to regain balance, but they are tired and listless, and receive little respite from the tedium of daily existence. Time grinds on. So it goes. C’est la vie. Disenchanting and honest, Wells does, however, allow them at least that tiny, unsatisfying enlightenment: his characters learn to accept (or at least, to acknowledge) that this weariness is the human condition, and they are granted the strength to continue, for now.

At the Q&A, when asked about inspiration and his writing process, the author likened it to defeat, of being forced to abandon something. At the end of the day, when faced with the world, Wells caves in. He must crawl out of the mire to begrudgingly take up the pen. “It’s like I have to give up,” he says, “before I begin to write.”

The literati have gobbled Wells up. The critics rave, and any story off his desk is pretty much guaranteed publication. He is hot, buttered shit, as they say. But what struck me most when I read his collection was that not a single one of his stories was solid gold. I am not compelled to say that any one of them was thoroughly amazing. There are, however, stunning moments, gold flecks scattered here and there—so refreshing to be reminded that perfection is not easily stumbled upon. In his debut collection, Wells Tower is an author openly humbled by his limitations, sharing the harsh reality that the work before us will always remain difficult.

-s