Fiction Born Of Rival Impulses: A Conversation With Wells Tower

Abstract

The stories in Wells Tower's debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned cover many of the same subjects found in the stories of the great American short fiction writer John Cheever: suburbia, family life, love, com ing of age. But unlike Cheever's stories, which begin with the semblance that life is fine but then veer off into despair, Tower's stories start off badly and then meander into something like despair. The characters experience pain, loneliness, isolation, and death not as dramatic events, but rather as small miseries. Even when a situation becomes violent, as it does when Ed gets into a fight and hears blood [howling] in his ears in the story Down Through the Valley, or life seems to be fire, as Matthew says in Retreat, the characters barely break into a sweat. In this, Tower's stories don't recall the despair of Dante's Inferno so much as the quirky anguish of a William Carlos Williams poem. Tower has received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and was fea tured in The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue last summer. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned received two glowing reviews in The New York Times—one from Edmund White and one from Michiko Kakutani. (Kakutani also chose it as one of the best books of 2009.) Tower visited Iowa City in February 2010 to promote the paperback edition of the collection. He is charming, quirkily handsome, and quite possibly the most self-effacing young man writing today. This interview took place on two occasions—the first after Tower's reading at Prairie Lights bookstore, the second the following day.