Thursday, April 15, 2010
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posted by aaron hamburger at 5:07 PM
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Monday, April 05, 2010
Don't Judge a Book by its Hype
Every once in a while, a book comes along with such hype attached, you want to avoid reading it, just out of spite. I must confess that for me, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower was just such a book. I'd heard so much about this story collection for so long, the thought of actually picking it up made me feel as if I were being manipulated.
My loss.
I'm not sure what the proverbial tipping point was, but a few weeks ago, I was browsing in a bookstore and picked up a copy of the paperback. Last week, I began to read.
What I love most about this book is the prose. It's hard to believe this is Tower's first book. Line after line, the guy comes up with arresting stuff like "a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas." His language is lovingly precise. Corduroy pants are "wide-waled," fake antique furniture is ornamented with "buboes" (I had to look that one up!), a hunky model is described as wearing a "cowrie shell necklace" and having "salt stiff hair." Tower's also great at finding metaphors that are both evocative and appropriate to his characters' world, like a character from the rural South who is described as having the figure of a "pickle jar."
Speaking of characters, what a range of beautifully etched lives are on display in this collection. The complexity of Tower's characters sneaks up on you as read. They're not necessarily people I'd want to have lunch with, but they keep surprising you with their vulnerability. As Tower makes painfully clear, they are people worth caring about, each with his or her own hurts and needs.
Finally, I love the way each of these stories end, usually on a wistful and inconclusive note. You know that the story has gone somewhere, but where is not immediately certain, a lot like life. In workshop (Tower went to my MFA program), I'm sure Tower must have heard that his endings weren't satisfying. I probably would have said the same thing myself. And yet, there's something Chekhovian about the way his stories move forward in time. It isn't necessarily that his characters or their lives have changes so much as they have shifted, in ways that will only become clear later in the characters' lives, or for readers, upon rereading.
My only quibbles about this book were the last two stories, which felt more like exercises that hadn't been fully fleshed out in comparison with the masterful stories that preceded them. But who cares? This is easily one of the best story collections I've read in a long time.
posted by aaron hamburger at 10:07 AM
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