Everybody's Talking About Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

By Tom

I've been meaning to do a longish post on Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower's new debut story collection, but life keeps getting in the way. But now I'm under the gun, for two reasons: a) it's becoming the book of the moment, at least if the New York Times is any guide, with a rave from Kakutani this week and a cover rave coming from Edmund White in this Sunday's Book Review (also see Sam Anderson's excellent piece in New York magazine); and, more importantly, b) my wife is going away for a week on Sunday and I've grudgingly agreed to let her take our copy of the book with her. So here's a shorter post than I'd planned, which is probably all to the best.

Speaking of short, here's the micro review I wrote when I put ER,EB in our Seven on the Side list on our Best of March page:

Best Set of Misfits: Bitter, dissolute, and funny, funny, funny: Tower's first story
collection bristles with the lonely havoc wreaked by stepdads, carnies,
and Vikings.

To be honest, I'm not sure I'd get it any better than that if I had any more words to work with. And speaking of the Best of the Month, I had a tough time making my pick for March. It came down to two story collections, ER,EB and Mary Gaitskill's Don't Cry. I actually read them at the same time, alternating a story from each. I thought that would make the comparison easier, but it didn't: my main reaction was, wow, these two can bring it. Both made me laugh and shake my head throughout, both ended with long title stories that stretched their craft in ways I did not come close to expecting. I ended up choosing Don't Cry as my main March pick, and I'm not even sure why I did--it could have gone either way. Gaitskill had a couple stories that didn't work for me, while Tower's were more consistent, but when Gaitskill's at the top of her game, I feel like she is peeling back about 17 layers from the face of humanity.

But now, a month or so later, maybe it's just that everybody's talking about it, but Tower's stories are the ones that are living in my head a little more vibrantly. For one thing, the reason my wife is running off with the book is that I've read this opening paragraph from the first story, "The Brown Coast," to her more than once, because it just keeps getting better:

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants. He'd come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him--under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them, he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there. Yet, Bob found that he could not fetch out the crumb. He had slept wrong on his arms, and they'd gone numb. He tried to move them, and it was like trying to push a coin with your mind. Waking up for the first time in this empty house, Bob felt the day beginning to settle on him. He shuddered at the cool linoleum against his cheek, and he sensed that not far below, not too far down in the sandy soil, death was reaching up for him.

See? You'd want me to let you take the book too...  And then there's the paragraph that I read aloud at the family dinner table the other night, to a giant guffaw from my nine-year-old:

He watched a mouse walk out from behind the soda machine. It was eating a coupon.

I don't think I need to say anything else, except that Tower pretty much keeps this level of concrete hilarity and fine-tuned (but somehow open-hearted) misery going throughout the entire collection. For your weekend viewing, here is a short animated adaptation of the title story, an outlier in the collection in subject, if not in language or attitude toward life:

Enjoy. --Tom