Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

When I enjoy a book of short stories, I want the author to go back and turn each story into a novel. I feel that way about Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. I read at least one of these in McSweeneys, and liked it. This is Wells Tower’s first book.  I wish he’d hurry up and publish a whole bunch of novels.

Here’s a nice bit from the story “Executors of Important Energies”:

“I had a studio apartment in the West Village, which people were impressed by until they came up for a look. The place was the architectural equivalent of a biscuit dough remnant, a two-hundred-square-foot wadte shape of crannies and recesses left over when the rest of the building had been sectioned into proper places to live.”"

Grade: A.

The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed by Don Carpenter

I recently read Don Carpenter’s novel Hard Rain Falling, and liked it, so I looked at the library (such lovely blog photos from library books) to see what else I could find.  I found The Dispossessed, a great novel about some of the people in the margins, i.e. homeless, mentally ill,  in a small California community. A very realistic and moving book.

Look for more of Don Carpenter’s books on this blog, as I find them. The library had a copy of his novel Getting Off, but someone cut out some of the sex scenes. Who would do that?

Grade: B+

The Clearing

The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux

I had read a book of short stories by Tim Gautreaux, Welding with Children, and enjoyed it, and The Clearing was no disappointment, either. It centered on two brothers, one estranged, the other trying to bring his brother back to the fold, in a 1920s small Louisiana lumber town back in the swamps. Gautreaux really brings the backwaters of Louisiana into focus.

The Clearing offers a fascinating perspective of timber practices of the time and of WWI veterans trying to assimilate back into society.  The novel draws a connection between them and the violence of the period. All the violent killers in the book are WWI vets. Makes me wonder how much inclination for violence come back from wars.  Grade: B.

The Burning

The Burning by Frank Norwood

I picked The Burning up at the public library. All I know about the author is what is on the dust jacket: he’s a social worker in Los Angeles.

I was sucked in by the storyline: A retired black tightrope walker gets a little tight and tries to resume his career on the wire. A black crowd gathers, the white cops come, try to force him to come down, and he falls to his death. A race riot ensues, and the novel follows these characters through the subsequent events.

Sounds like it could be a promising novel, but it doesn’t come through. The plot just slows down and falls apart. No climatic conclusion.  The characters are contrived and a little flat.Disappointing.  Grade: F

Riven Doggeries

Riven Doggeries by James Tate

James Tate has always been one of my favorite poets; his Selected Poems really opened a door for me, in understanding and enjoying poetry.  I have purchased and read his readily  available books, and most of the scarce ones, but when I saw this copy of Riven Doggeries (his seventh book)in a used bookstore, I couldn’t resist it.

This is an inscribed copy of the 1978 Ecco Press paperback edition. It’s not signed by Tate, but from one woman to another:

Spring 1981
To Diane
I found this book for you last week . It’s a sort of an unbirthday present, and to say that I believe in your artistic genius. There’s more to say, but later. I remembered you liked Tate’s Lost Pilot from last summer…and that I went to high school with him. More on that later. God bless you..
Connie

So it’s from a mother to her daughter? Friend to friend? Somebody that went to high school with James Tate, anyway. A book with a little history.

And revisiting these poems (nearly all my books are in storage) reminds me why I read them to begin with. Tate is a wonderful writer of surreal comic narrative poems that take you places you have never been.

The Shy One

Don’t look at me
splintering these daffodils,
when I’m at my worst
defoliating their atoms:
I’m one of the hideously weak sort,
a silhouette that roosts
on a streetlamp and
murmurs a low fire.

Of course I sometimes blame it
on the circumstances
of my unholy birth,
hanging there, a stranger
torn by solitary comets:
How could I see beyond
that somber spark?

I spoke words on a banjo
swooning in mint sauce,
heard dulcimer squalls
in my hot suite.
If I could sing like poultry,
with flaming green lips
wag my head through perfume,
I would be as pleased
as a tipster nomad
in his bath. Alone and proud,

proud cloud poised above my wrist
and cruel chords remembering…
And because of this
and so much more, I am allowed
to scratch my way to the surface again:
A fabulous homing instinct remains,
and wounds.

Grade: A.

Horseman Pass By

Horseman Pass By by Larry McMurtry

Horseman Pass By was Larry McMurtry’s first novel, and the basis for the film Hud. This is a beautiful classic western novel of a proud father, a son “gone bad” and a grandson, caught in the middle, and providing the narrative perspective.

I have read most of McMurtry’s books and this is one of his best. Not to be missed by anyone who likes non-genre western fiction. Grade: A.

McSweeney’s Issue 30

McSweeney’s Issue 30

McSweeney’s is always fun. Issue 30 is the Forge-Ahead/Throwback issue, and it resembles in its shape and design the earliest issues, which were, and are, nonsensical and sharp. And they published an amazing array of authors, from the most famous to the undiscovered. This issue has eleven excellent stories, including one by Wells Tower, whose story collection,  Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, I just coincidentally picked up at the library. Look for a post on it soon.

The actor Michael Cera has his first published story here, Pinecone; I enjoyed it. All of the stories here possess strong, contemporary voices. McSweeney’s is always a joy to read all the way through. Grade: B+

October Light

October Light by John Gardner

A thoroughly enjoyable novel from John Gardner, who  I was familiar with through his terrific version of Grendel, and On Moral Fiction, his popular book on fiction writing.

An aging brother and sister quarrel and she locks herself in her room, and reads a strange novel, big chunks of which are scattered throughout the book.  A  novel-within-a-novel approach, and it works. A little pedantic, though; I get a sense of smug-author-ness, too, in the way the book is put together. The author seems to look down on his characters a little.

Gardner was known as a fairly feisty lit critic and teacher. He was Raymond Carver’s writing teacher. He knows fiction and it shows in this book. I picked up a copy of The Sunlight Dialogues when I got October Light, It looks good too. Grade: B.

Tattoo and The Devil to Pay

Tattoo and The Devil to Pay by Earl Thompson

These two novels are the last two-thirds of a trilogy by Earl Thompson. The first book is A Garden of Sand. I had read these some time ago and thought they were very well done. I didn’t intend to reread these, but I could get both books for fifty cents, and I just picked Tattoo up and dived right in; I read the first thirty pages right there in the thrift store.

These novels are vaguely autobiographical, which is what brought them to my attention in the first place. Thompson was born in Wichita and spent a good part of his life there, and much of the novels are set in Wichita. There aren’t many really good novels that are. Here is a section from Tattoo, with a description of World War Two-era Wichita:

“Standing on the corner of Market and Douglas in downtown Wichita in a pair of leaden Levi’s, a Falstaff beer T-shirt and run-down cowboy boots, he measured his reflection in Kress’ plate glass against the image of the soldier, salior, flyboy, and the occasional marine who marched so resolutely past, eyes fixed on eternity, turning the admiring glances of bobby-soxers and swingshifters, haunting the longings of wives and Gold and Blue mothers alike.”

This series reminds me of the Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell in both scope and in structure. What Thompson does for Wichita, Farrell does for the South Side of Chicago. A Garden of Sand follows the protagonist Jack from childhood through young manhood. Tattoo beginbs with Jack joining the Navy at fourteen by lying to a recruiter and serving in World War Two and Korea. The Devil to Pay takes the reader from his military discharge in 1953 to his first novel in 1971.

Thompson only wrote these three books and one other, Caldo Largo (the story of an alienated veteran who becomes a gun runner in the Caribbean), before he died in 1978. The Devil to Pay was published posthumously. Grade: B+.

Th

Jumping the Queue

Jumping the Queue by Mary Wesley

I had not read anything by Mary Wesley, whom I had thought of as just another stodgy old-lady British writer (she published her first novel at 70),  until I was convinced to watch a miniseries version of her novel The Camomile Lawn. The film and this book are both excellent.

Wesley’s Britishers are anything but stodgy. Her sharp eye  and sharp tongue dissected the social and sexual mores of her generation. This novel is delightfully comic and dark, filled with an array of characters that are earthy, secretive, independent, and fierce. I’d like to read The Camomile Lawn, and more. Wesley wrote ten novels before her death in 2002. Grade: B+