For Wells Tower, paper planes spiraling down
EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED
By Wells Tower
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $24
Like paper airplanes loosed from a height, the lives in "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" mostly spiral and crash. The art, and in the best of them it is considerable, is in the float, the impromptu curvet, the exhilarating lift on the way down.
Wells Tower's characters, anomic or screwed-up, gleam with the most precise and up-to-date details of contemporary discouragement. Yet at the end they get that most traditional of twists, an epiphany: a release into spaciousness, that is, from the compressed confinement of the short-story form. Except that Tower's epiphanies are a release into further confinement.
"On the Show" is a wonderfully evocative panorama of a traveling carnival. Its people include the tough proprietor of an aerial ride, a blind woman taking the ride, an old carny, a young drifter, a man and woman on their first date and the son each brings along. The story weaves poetically among this assorted collection, rather like a fairground "Under Milkwood." Soured milk, as baleful things happen to several of them.
But Tower gives us a flight of long-legged birds landing in a tree at evening. "The tree moves with a white restlessness of egrets stowing and unstowing their overlong wings." His blind woman, flying weightless at the height of the ride, "smiles as though she's just recalled the answer to a question that had been worrying her for a long time."
In "Retreat," the down spiral is if anything overevident from the start. Matthew, the narrator, is dogged by the perpetual hostility and jealousy of Stephen, his younger brother; we come to see that the bitterness, oddly entangled with love, goes both ways. The older brother has made a small real estate fortune; the younger chooses to practice poverty and a mystical form of music therapy. Their duel flaunts richer-than-thou against holier-than-thou.
Ending in Stephen's ill-fated visit to Matthew's paradisal retreat in Maine, the story is something of an over-programmed machine, with an outcome that is both grotesque and glib. Along the way, though, Tower draws a vivid portrait of mutual longing overlaid by mutual rankling: two porcupines groping to hug and counting the injuries. In a splendid phrase he writes of a drive through the impoverished countryside of backwoods Maine and its "bleary rural abridgements of towns."
The weaker stories spiral down without much of a countervailing lift. "Executors of Important Energies" tells in choppy fashion of a night on the town spent by a man with a father who suffers from a beginnings of dementia, and turns increasingly erratic.
"Wild America" is an overlong account of a plain girl, jealous of her glamorous and flirtatious cousin, who stumbles beyond her depth flirting with a predatory young man. She gets out of danger at the cost of a humiliation greater than the humiliation that drove her into it.
In the title piece, two reluctant Vikings who would much prefer to stay home are dragged into the yearly savage raid on Britain. The target this time is the island of Lindisfarne. The raiders had already despoiled the place but, as the leader insists, the point is havoc for the sheer fun of it. Laboring to be amusing, it is little more than a semi-grotesque contraption. The Asterix cartoon books did this kind of thing better and more lightly.
In two of the most appealing stories Tower's paper planes, seemingly down, manage a defiant lift at the end. The old protagonist of "Door in Your Eye," failing and overmanaged by his bossy daughter, escapes her vigilance to visit a neighbor who he imagines - judging by the procession of men calling on her - is a prostitute. Hoping for a last fling, he knocks on her door, only to find she is the neighborhood drug dealer. What should have been a humiliating mistake turns into an oddly cheerful visit; Tower fashions valiant out of silly.
In "The Brown Coast," a young man finds himself at the nadir of a series of failures. He has lost his carpenter's job because of a stupid mistake, his wife has left him, and an ostensible favor - a beach cottage his uncle lends him - is a nightmare. The light fixing-up the uncle has asked for turns out to be a laborious misery. And the beach is a mud flat.
Tower begins with a wonderfully vivid scene of waking up to morning awfulness. And bit by bit a series of ventures and encounters - fish found in a tidal pool and used to restart a derelict aquarium; the raffish friendship of an eccentric neighbor couple - serve to bring the young man out of his funk. What is created is not hope, exactly, but a sense of picaresque possibility; not a matter of life happening to him but of him happening to life.
Richard Eder reviews books for numerous publications. 
