A review by ben_miller
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
3.0
"Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" improves as it goes along, starting out with 4 wretched stories before finding its feet with "Leopard" and achieving mixed success until the final story, the title story, which is the crowning achievement of this collection.
The writing here is mostly serviceable, and ranges from the very bad to the very good. Someone tell Wells Tower to never again write about divorced men who drink too much, because he ends up with a Raymond Carver story minus the clever, simple plotting and the irrepressibly engaging voice. In other words, he ends up with a bad Raymond Carver story. When he writes about children and teenagers and Vikings, something comes alive in the prose that is dead elsewhere - he abandons the flat sarcasm and the sharp jokes which consistently fail to amuse and produces something more honest and affecting.
Towers' sense of story structure is bizarre throughout. Rather than using his inventory and bringing the business of the story to a conclusion, he consistently drops threads in order to pick up other ones, never returning to the original story. I have no doubt that he's doing this on purpose, but I do doubt its effectiveness. He allows the stories to go sideways, to take unexpected paths, as good stories should. However, some of these pieces feel like watching 20 minutes out of the middle of a movie - they don't end, they just stop. It would be a worse sin for him to tie each story up in a little bow, but still, these stories are mostly unresolved. In fact, in a number of them it feels to me as though the central business of the story, the key scene, never even happens.
There's plenty in this book to indicate that Wells Tower could go on to write something really good, but this isn't it.
The writing here is mostly serviceable, and ranges from the very bad to the very good. Someone tell Wells Tower to never again write about divorced men who drink too much, because he ends up with a Raymond Carver story minus the clever, simple plotting and the irrepressibly engaging voice. In other words, he ends up with a bad Raymond Carver story. When he writes about children and teenagers and Vikings, something comes alive in the prose that is dead elsewhere - he abandons the flat sarcasm and the sharp jokes which consistently fail to amuse and produces something more honest and affecting.
Towers' sense of story structure is bizarre throughout. Rather than using his inventory and bringing the business of the story to a conclusion, he consistently drops threads in order to pick up other ones, never returning to the original story. I have no doubt that he's doing this on purpose, but I do doubt its effectiveness. He allows the stories to go sideways, to take unexpected paths, as good stories should. However, some of these pieces feel like watching 20 minutes out of the middle of a movie - they don't end, they just stop. It would be a worse sin for him to tie each story up in a little bow, but still, these stories are mostly unresolved. In fact, in a number of them it feels to me as though the central business of the story, the key scene, never even happens.
There's plenty in this book to indicate that Wells Tower could go on to write something really good, but this isn't it.