Writer to Watch: Wells Tower

The author of “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2009)  is quickly gaining a dedicated following. Tower, drawing comparisons to everyone from Sam Shepard to Frederick Bartheleme to David Foster Wallace, has earned notice for his lively plotting, textured characters, and expert detailing. With an MFA from Columbia and two Pushcart Prizes for magazine journalism, he has even impressed the notoriously tough Michiko Kakutani, who wrote of his debut collection, “Mr. Tower has an instinctive gift for creating characters with finely calibrated interior lives and an almost Dickensian physical immediacy. His writing can be darkly hilarious and grotesque and yet simultaneously attuned to his people’s sense of loss and bewilderment and frustration. ”

Yet Tower does not restrict his writing to tightly wound stories of stark personal and existential conflict. In a recent interview with The New York Observer, Tower said, “Being a human being isn’t just all misery and despair. There’s a lot of available joy out there, even if we don’t often find it. I think that fiction should find opportunities for joy.” A subtle sense of joy is manifest in his story “Leopard,” which utilizes the rarer second-person point of view, through details such as the protagonist Yancy’s mother’s work clothes, Barbara Eden’s exposed midriff, and even in the dangerous hum of the leopard he imagines stalking his hawkish stepfather from the corners of their wilderness property. Bucking the themes of melancholia that pervade much of the contemporary short story market, Tower says, “I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in.”