If I had to pick one adjective to get at what makes Anthony Doerr so unique among contemporary fiction writers, as evidenced by his remarkable new collection, Memory Wall, it’s respectful. Doerr is daring, yes, and compassionate, but more than anything, the four stories and two novellas in this collection are imbued with, and fueled by, a deep, almost anachronistic-seeming respect for his twin muses: memory and the natural world. As a result, you finish reading this book with a richly enlivened sense of both as they relate to your own life.

Understandably, Doerr sees great tragedy in the demise of memory. We age. Our capacity to remember fades and then blinks out, taking with it a universe of experience. In the opening pages of the title novella we’re introduced to Alma Konachek of Cape Town, South Africa, seventy-four years old and widowed, sitting up in bed, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s. In a flashback we see her contemplating the onset of her dementia:

Seven decades of stories, five decades of marriage, four decades of working for Porter Properties, too many houses and buyers and sellers to count—spatulas and salad forks, novels and recipes, nightmares and daydreams, hellos and goodbyes. Could it all really be wiped away?”

Believe it or not, Doerr is setting up an action story. In his near-future setting, doctors have figured out a way to “reclaim” memories before they’re gone by imprinting them onto disks, thereafter accessible only by those who’ve had high-tech ports inserted into their skulls. Alma’s memories—particularly one involving the discovery of a valuable fossil—attract the interest of some baddies. The novella’s pacing and the thrust of its plot owe much to Hollywood, a fact that lends it a vaguely derivative feel, but Doerr never fails to keep his themes and his characters front and center. It’s fitting that a major plot twist occurs when Alma’s power of recall—a train that has very much left the station, we assume—inexplicably returns in one crucial moment.

Anthony Doerr

Memory operates by its own rules, Doerr knows. We are all regularly visited by incongruous images and associations from our past, and though we sometimes know what to make of them—or even what to do with them—we often don’t, and they end up part of the ever-morphing tumble of memory, fantasy and self-delusion that comprise our personalities. In “Procreate, Generate,” a Wyoming couple gleefully embarking on a journey to get pregnant find their progress thwarted by cold, hard science (rendered with reverent exactitude by Doerr). They suffer individually, beset by vivid images of themselves as parents—Imogene cooking Tunisian food with an infant strapped to her chest, Herb waiting beneath an umbrella for his children to come out of the rain—and by fragmented memories: Imogene’s father on his knees, searching the hall rug for pieces of her broken teeth. Here and elsewhere in the collection, Doerr particularizes his characters’ isolation in a way that—as the best writing always does—makes us feel less alone.

Those characters include a “seed keeper” living in a rural Chinese village targeted for flooding by the government, under the supervision of her own relocated son, and a sixteen-year-old Kansas girl negotiating her new life as an orphan in Lithuania, where she watches Boy Meets Grill on satellite television and finally takes to hunting an elusive, possibly unreal fish. The quest links her to her dead mother, who fished the same waters as a girl, but it soon comes to represent a much bigger search. Confronting her grandfather’s skepticism, she says, “So what, Grandpa, you don’t believe in anything you can’t see? You believe we don’t have souls?” She’s not quite sure herself, but she’s making a go of it.

All of Doerr’s characters, as they are batted about by memory and circumstance, find solace in the beauty and mystery of nature. It’s in this capacity that they serve most overtly as stand-ins for the author. Doerr’s eye for natural detail is astounding. Countless, gorgeously executed descriptions of the natural world pepper Memory Wall—droplets of water leaving a fingertip and reflecting back tiny shards of light before entering a river; an imagined “galaxy” of prehistoric clams flapping their shells at the sun—and every one of them feels like Doerr’s heart on the page, laid open.

A funny thing about this kind of gushing, no matter how masterfully done: It can get a bit old. Over time, Doerr’s setting details ceased to sneak up and wow me and instead began to arrive at too predictable a rhythm, often at too far a remove from character. Stories stalled. Mother nature’s unflagging benevolence began to grate. This is the flipside of Doerr’s ever-respectful worldview, and it applies to his characters, as well. I could have used a moral lapse or two. Maybe a crummy, hurtful decision. Doerr cares so deeply about these people that he’s clearly reluctant to instill them with anything so unsavory as a bad intention. However threatened they may be, they are seldom a danger to themselves.

Yet, when these stories are working, you hardly notice. Doerr is at his best, I think, in the collection’s final piece, a sweeping, ambitious novella titled “Afterworld,” which takes us back and forth in time and across the globe in the company of an epileptic named Esther. As an imperiled child in World War II Hamburg, her seizures are terrifying affairs that usher in strange, prophetic visions. Much later, in the twilight of her life, they serve as conduits to both visions and memory, providing immense peace as she begins to take leave of her body. In a moment of lucidity, she encapsulates an idea that Doerr has been fleshing out over the course of the book:

Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.

The triumph of Memory Wall is the sureness with which it convinces us to pay attention, both to the world around us and to the kingdom within. We’re all in decline. But with a little work, that decline can feel a lot like ascension

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However you feel after finishing Amy Bloom’s new collection of stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, you certainly won’t be at a loss to answer the question implied in its title. The action takes place, by and large, in living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. Conversations prickling with decades of regret happen at the sink, as one speaker washes and the other dries. Reluctant lovers on long, slow collisions finally accept the inevitable in front of the television, with Greta Van Susteren supplying background music. Even when Bloom does send her characters off-property—to bars, to hospitals, to Paris—it’s only a matter of time before she turns them right around. This love god is a homebody, through and through.

If you think this sounds like a recipe for claustrophobia, you’re partly right. By halfway through Bloom’s new collection I was yearning for an open field, even an airplane hangar. But it’s also true that domestic spaces are only as humdrum as the people inhabiting them, and Bloom’s characters, I’m happy to pronounce, are glorious, endearing wrecks. They are simultaneously loyal, petty, resentful, and compassionate. They are vain, horny, bullheaded, and brave. In their messy assemblage of traits they are new to us yet resemble everyone we’ve ever known intimately. What unites them, and this collection, is the attention they finally pay to love’s power of transcendence. They know what they want. Whether they get it, and whether their enlightenment comes too late, is another matter.

Amy Bloom

On the first page of the opening story, “Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages,” we meet William and Clare, two of the more successful pursuers: middle-aged, old friends, relatively content with their respective spouses and yet deeply, tacitly in love with each other. William’s trembling hand is resting, for the first time, on Clare’s breast. Talk about beginning in media res. The triumph of this very moving and unabashedly erotic story—Bloom writes beautiful, unflinching sex scenes, all the more effective for being inseparable from character—is the way in which Bloom convinces us of the rightness of their affair. If we have any reservations about their behavior, we ditch them before long; these two were made for each other.

Bloom confirms this over the course of three more stories, as we follow William’s and Clare’s halting progress toward marriage and its aftermath. Along the way we slide around in point of view, inhabiting the perspectives of minor characters including William’s wife, Isabelle, and Nelson, the eagle-eyed, chess-playing son of Clare’s maid. When William, a bear of a man, develops gout, in the story “I Love to See You Coming, I Hate to See You Go,” his interactions with Clare become dryly hilarious.

William sits back in his armchair, moving his right foot out of harm’s way. If Clare gently presses his foot or lets the cuff of her pants just brush against his ankle, it will hurt worse than either of his heart attacks. He sees Clare angling toward him and moves his leg back a little more.

“Don’t bump me,” he says.

“I wasn’t going to bump you.”

When Clare, without thinking, compares his deformed appendage to a giant turnip, “William is happy to hear her say so. His heart rises on a small, breaking wave of love just because Clare, who says precisely the wrong and tactless thing as naturally as breathing, is with him, and will be right here for almost twenty-four hours.”

With their deadpan wit, their quirks and requirements and tangled allegiances, this couple will make you a little giddy, I promise, and when the happiness they have so painstakingly achieved comes to an abrupt end, you will learn something about the nature of loss. And the nature of great writing.

The eight remaining stories in Where the God of Love Hangs Out, despite their considerable strengths, exist in William’s and Clare’s collective shadow. This is a matter partly of content and partly of arrangement. There is a second quartet of linked stories about a different couple, Lionel and Julia, stepson and stepmother, who, in a moment of poor judgment fueled by mutual grief and no small amount of liquor, fall into bed together. Over the course of many years they navigate the repercussions of this act. There’s an implied invitation here to compare Lionel and Julia to William and Clare—to see them as soulmates of the same caliber, struggling under more wretched circumstances. I didn’t buy it. Bloom herself seems unconvinced. She piles on the particular detail. Point of view shifts that came naturally in the earlier stories feel here like mildly desperate attempts to keep the ball rolling. The result is an acutely observed, vividly populated narrative that adds up to the sum of its parts and no more. Three of the Lionel and Julia stories have been published in Bloom’s two earlier collections. A fourth, “Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous,” appears to have been written expressly to give their storyline closure. It’s difficult not to see this decision to dust off and expand upon old material as contrived—a misguided attempt to lend the new collection symmetry. Instead, it throws it out of whack.

Fortunately, the misalignment isn’t fatal—Bloom’s talents are too prodigious. Throughout this book she doggedly, thrillingly keeps at her investigation of love in its many forms. “Fort Useless,” near its conclusion, provides a new angle on the theme in the form of Robert, a gay man mourning the loss of his best friend and confronting a chilly reception by her gathered relatives. After being insincerely invited to stay for coffee, he considers making himself scarce:

He is an impediment; he is an awful, faggy roadblock to their mother’s memory, and the sooner he picks up his odds and ends and goes back to Old Fagland, the better. Robert is not a brave man; he has stood up for himself a couple of times, in a polite way, over the course of seventy years, but he isn’t the kind of person who stays where he isn’t wanted. Julia was. Julia was just that kind of person, going where she wasn’t wanted, still telling people to go fuck themselves, and Julia had loved him. He had braided her long gray hair and they had discussed whether or not she should cut it after all this time, and he had rubbed moisturizer into the dry skin between her shoulder blades and trailed his finger down her spine and toward the small folds of skin above her waist. Julia said, No playing with my love handles. Robert had leaned forward to kiss them and said, Lovely, lovely handles. Robert pulls up a chair and he pats Jewelle on the knee.

“If I may change my mind, coffee would be lovely.”

In “Between Here and Here,” a woman watches, amazed and conflicted, as her father, a bitter, verbally abusive man, accesses something like tenderness during the onset of senility. It’s a tribute to Bloom’s powers of characterization that the transformation leaves us gape-mouthed, as well—this is a man who responds to his college-aged son’s coming-out speech with a poke in the stomach and the words, “A fat fag? Not much fun in that.” The delightful, nuanced title story closes the collection in much the same way that “Your Borders” opens it: on a note of hope. This time we get a married man in the grips of a head-spinning crush while his daughter-in-law, living in the same town, struggles to keep from collapsing under the weight of family secrets. Clumsily, without quite meaning to, each props the other up in a crucial moment.

Are their troubles really over? Doubtful. But they can worry about that later. As Bloom reminds us repeatedly in Where the God of Love Hangs Out, you gotta take what you can get when you can get it. We may be a bunch of idiots, stumbling around after love, fooling ourselves into thinking it has any kind of permanence—but we sure as hell have our priorities straight.

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You’d be forgiven, upon learning that the title story in Wells Tower’s debut story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, concerns a band of Viking marauders who use phrases like “We got to get it on,” for expecting a certain kind of book. You know the kind: purposefully zany. The kind you purchase against your better judgment, eager for lightness and yuks; once the self-congratulatory cleverness becomes too much—about three and half stories in—buyer’s remorse looms large. You flip repeatedly to the author photo, detecting a smugness you hadn’t noticed in the bookstore. Ultimately, you leave the book next to the toilet.

What a delight, then, to discover that Tower is not a gag-meister at all but an extremely gifted and compassionate writer, with a lot more on his mind than hitting the irony button over and over. The writing on every page of Everything Ravaged is nuanced, complex and true. Even when he stumbles—and a few of these stories fail to add up—Tower earns our respect by virtue of his ambition, and of the care with which he sculpts his fictional worlds. What this collection mostly does is sing. Beautifully.

The title story (which many readers first came across in the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories) is a tour de force. In it, our Viking narrator, Harald, sets out with his cohorts to re-sack the much-sacked island of Lindisfarne with all the enthusiasm of a middle manager heading to a convention at the DoubleTree. He’d much rather be back home with his common-law, getting started on a brood. The story gives us dragons, a one-armed seamstress, and a Tasmanian Devil of warfare named Djarf (one of the funniest characters I’ve read in ages – his backstory alone is nearly worth the price of admission), alongside prose like this:

“But when we came into the bright little bay, a quiet fell over all of us. Even the hockchoppers quit grab-assing and looked. The place was wild with fields of purple thistle, and when the wind blew, it twitched and rolled, like the hide of some fantastic animal shrugging in its sleep. Wildflowers spurted on the hills in fat red gouts.”

The gouts soon get literal, as blood is spilled, and in this context they serve as both spectacle and substance. The story is a dark, gorgeously detailed meditation on the terrible burden of loving someone in a violent world. All that and it’s funny as hell.

Things are darker still in “On the Show.” A highly readable version of this story appeared in Harper’s in 2007, centering on a young man’s escape to a traveling carnival in a backwater town, but that version now seems like a mere warm-up. Here, we experience the “show” in all of its vivid, heartbreaking detail from multiple points of view—a crooked ride operator, a fumbling middle-aged couple on a first date, and so on. The narratives chafe against one another, informing one another, and a heinous crime early on generates suspense that crackles through each of them. The story is as stirring and as wide-ranging as a symphony.

Wells Tower

Tower is clearly interested in violence—the threat of it around us, our attraction to it, our capability to inflict it. In “Down through the Valley,” a man is pushed to the brink after enduring a car ride with his ex-wife’s new-agey lover. Let’s just say he fails to maintain. That his climactic meltdown is one of the least effective passages in Everything Ravaged has something to do with his bitterness, which has kept us at emotional bay. But it also has to do with the fact that in this collection, title story included, violence is most powerful when it lurks just off-screen: as it does in “Leopard,” in the form of a conniving fifteen-year-old boy’s thuggish, domineering stepfather (in a wonderful touch, the stepfather is a thin, delicate man with wire-framed glasses); and in “Wild America,” which gives us Jacey, an adolescent girl driven by jealousy to make some questionable choices in the woods. Each of these stories also benefits from a charming, fully realized viewpoint character—no quick synopsis can convey the extent to which you’ll begin to care about these people and wish to see them delivered from harm.

Ditto Albert, the cantankerous, housebound eighty-three-year-old narrator of “Door in Your Eye,” who develops an interest in the less-than-honorable comings and goings at the apartment of a woman across the street. We quickly suspect that Albert will venture over there to investigate, and when he does, Tower has great fun undermining our expectations.

The best stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned unfold that way: with the unpredictability of life and all of its attendant dangers. It’s those dangers that keep us reading. When a character in “On the Show” shows up for the tenth time at the Pirate, a rickety, boat-themed carnival ride, we understand just where she’s coming from: “Go on, now,” she tells the operator. “Get this thing moving. Get me as high as you can.”

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