If you’re of a certain political persuasion, there is not too much to be hopeful about at the minute. The country is divided and uncertainty has infected the wounds gained on the Brexit battleground. To make matters worse, this summer has been a non-event: a soggy, cloudy affair punctuated by malarial hot flushes. But in times of great upheaval, fiction can be a powerful unifying force. And what better to relieve that built-up angst than a good book?
After all, great short stories capture the evanescent moments that all people experience, exalting them to art. As David Foster Wallace once said: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Wells Tower, with his tales of everymen and women trying to do the right thing, is just the writer for the task. His stories aren’t restricted to one class, geography or situation; they frequently contain types eschewed by mainstream fiction. If you are in need of escapism, he is a consciously entertaining writer, who has said: “I hope I’m rewarding the reader with language or narrative immediacy.”
I first came across Wells Tower in Granta’s 2015 collection, New American Stories. His riotous Raw Water was a standout. Set in an unspecified future, the story documents a middle-aged couple’s move to a community next to a vast manmade inland sea in Arizona. It is at once funny, grotesque and very human. The language is a marvel: inventive, playful and filled with energy. Even with the comedy – a face is described “like a left-handed sketch” – there is an emotional sincerity to the work.
Given its title, Tower’s 2011 debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned may seem like an odd choice as a book to give you hope. But it will not only give you hope in mankind: it will also give you hope in the future of short fiction. Tower demonstrates the possibilities of the form, his nine stories flitting between the first, third and even second person; protagonists as varied as an 83-year-old man, a teenage girl and a seven-year-old boy. And while its down-and-out male characters can seem like the kind of schlemiels found in George Saunders’s work or the alcohol-scarred searchers of Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson, there is something entirely singular about them. 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.
Tower displays an Updikean eye for the poetry of the everyday and a miniaturist’s feel for detail that is a joy to read. From the book’s very first sentences you know you are in the hands of a special talent:
Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was a real discomfort in his underpants.
Like many great writers before him who have mastered what Juan Gabriel Vásquez describes as “the concentration and subtlety of the short story”, Tower has a gift for great endings, too. A case in point is the heartrending conclusion of Executors of Important Energies, where a chess hustler unexpectedly steals a car to ferry the narrator, his stepmother and his dementia-suffering father home. Bold images like this manage to both linger and enlighten.
Most of the book’s protagonists are striving for happiness despite having conspicuous flaws. Their self-defeating natures and their attempts to do the right thing when faced with moral dilemmas endear them to the reader. And the author’s powers of observation are such that one cannot help but associate with all of the characters, in spite of their mistakes and idiosyncratic situations. The author himself has said: “I don’t think that many of us are trying to do ill. And I think that most of the ill that happens in the world happens despite our best notions of ourselves. And that’s something that continues to interest me.”
By tapping in to the decency of the human spirit, Tower achieves something transcendent. The often-sad plights of the characters affect us as readers, and remind us not of our conspicuous differences but of our common humanity. At a time when dichotomies – however false – are being drawn up daily, that is a powerful message.
