Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

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I think I've seen this quoted elsewhere, and it's not really "good" prose, but it made me laugh) "'I'd eat her whole damn child just to taste the thing he squeezed out of. For me, this collection shows that Wells Tower is a master of words, a true talent with crafting some beautiful sentences, but for the most part, is still some way short of being a great storyteller. Aunque los tiempos han cambiado, los perdedores siempre serán perdedores y sus historias son ahora tan duras y descarnadas —y atractivas— como hace 50 años. Life is more like this, wading through the muck of living, acting and reacting without real prior planning. pisane sigurnom rukom, prikazuju život kakav jest, realistično i neuljepšano - likovi nisu lijepi i bogati kao iz nerealnih i klišeiziranih ljubavnih priča, nego onakvi kakvi već ljudi jesu: nesigurni, ljuti, pretili, boluju od psorijaze i srčanih bolesti, djeca su okrutna i donose krive životne odluke.

Because all the stories here (except one) are cut from the crazy cultural layercake that is contemporary America, the extraordinarily ordinary scenes of bad romances, sudden fights, pleasure and boredom, difficult brothers, ex-wives, stepfathers, tv, a little too much to drink, a little bit of dope, sexy cousins, places you really wouldn’t want to be, and of course places you really would like to be, for a week or two at least. It’s the catty competition between Jacey, “with a shiny chin and forehead and a figure like a pickle jar,” and her cousin, Maya, “a five-foot-ten-inch mantis of legendary poise and ballet repute. In Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis —that classic essay on the origins of American republicanism—the historian pauses over a description of what happens to the pioneer when civilization catches up to him. The way he looked, blanched and wide-eyed, he could have been facing a wild dog instead of a good-looking woman.He's fond of putting a bunch of short-tempered people in an environment, and then, admirably, deciding to narrate from the perspective of the most deluded asshole in the bunch.

This is a collection all about manly men in the height of their manliness, doing manly things like hunting deer and having questionable affairs with questionable women, all while suffering from some seriously bad cases of Manpain (a. Some of that comes from their youth – many are children or adolescents – but more of it comes from the language, which is more playful and expansive than the dirty realism and minimalism that Tower clearly admires. Unfortunately, it’s a very good shortcut to explaining the overall theme of the short stories enclosed with the book’s covers. I read the first story, which was your standard New Yorker story about a middle-aged middle-class guy doing something vague and poignant during a Major Life Moment.The husband’s affair in “The Brown Coast” is discovered in a novel way — when his wife realizes that the small footprint on the front window of their car doesn’t match her own. Well, yes, so Wells Tower shows again that you take some guitars and a bass and drums, the same old instruments that they been using since the sixties, and you can still make magic. Da igual; las comparaciones son odiosas y, en todo caso, Tower escribe con voz propia; una voz descarada, actual, mordaz.