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The Call of the WildWells Tower's debut collection is strong stuff.

By Juliet LapidosPosted Tuesday, March 24, 2009, at 7:14 AM ET

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The Vikings, of course, are really Americans—invading a tiny country for no apparent reason. And all the American characters in the collection are Vikings—randomly violent, tough, and dangerous to know—just on a smaller scale. They are real-estate developers, carpenters, and entrepreneur inventors, bumbling through life, alienating their spouses, relatives, and friends. Tower isn't the first writer to document the anti-social American spirit, but he's a keen observer of how the drive to break out of confinement rarely leads to true release. Like Harald, Tower's other characters—for the most part—do love their families, but they constantly find themselves striking out alone. And their missions have a way of backfiring.

Take Matthew, the narrator in "Retreat," a thrice-married real-estate developer who has "lived and profited in nine American cities" and just recently bought a small mountain in Maine. Since childhood, he's had a tense relationship with his brother, Stephen, but after six strong drinks, "our knotty history unkinks itself into a sad and simple thing. I go wet at the eyes for my brother and swell with regret at the thirty-nine years we've spent lost to each other." He invites Stephen up for a weekend hunting trip with the best intentions but antagonizes him compulsively: He's late for the airport pickup, and their reunion starts off with a fight. Back at his cabin, he pressures Stephen to spend his life savings on a real-estate venture, then storms off to bed. When Stephen tries to communicate his sense of loneliness, Matthew lets out "a long, low fart."

These cruelties are uniformly petty: just so many paper cuts. Yet the cumulative effect is excruciating for Stephen, as well as for the reader watching Matthew ruin the weekend. Not least, they are excruciating for Matthew himself, who succeeds only in walling himself off. In the final scenes, Matthew shoots a moose and feels momentarily elated. But the meat is spoiled: "[T]here was a slight pungency to it, a dark diarrheal scent gathering in the air." While Stephen laughs it off, vowing to hunt again the next day, Matthew stubbornly eats his putrid steak—a bizarre bid to deny the fruitlessness of their trip, which becomes yet another point of separation between the two brothers.

Many of Tower's protagonists are so hypermasculine they're Hemingway-esque. Yet one of his best-drawn characters is Jacey, the teenage girl in "Wild America." The title is lightly comic, setting the reader up for another story like "Retreat." What's "wild" here is not a geographic area—although much of the action takes place in a state forest. It's the catty competition between Jacey, "with a shiny chin and forehead and a figure like a pickle jar," and her cousin, Maya, "a five-foot-ten-inch mantis of legendary poise and ballet repute." Their casus belli is Leander, an unhygienic boy with no trace of his namesake's seductive warmth, whom Jacey kissed recently at the local planetarium. When the three set off together for a walk, Maya first plays the part of wingwoman, talking up Jacey's accomplishments, but soon tires of that role and starts to flirt with Leander.

Tower's portrayal of Jacey's reaction is pitch-perfect: Unable to compete with Maya, she lashes out in an agonizingly childish but still hurtful way. "[W]hy don't you just go off somewhere and fuck? I mean, there's all kinds of bushes and stuff around here for you all to fuck in. … She'll totally do it. She's a pretty big slut." All Jacey can do after her outburst is run off alone: Tension leads quickly to ferocity, then to the fantasy of isolation. Adventure thwarted, Jacey wants to "go back to the afternoon dark of her mother's house and watch TV and eat Triscuit crackers topped with cheddar cheese and a pickle coin." But she feels "Maya and Leander's eyes on her, watching her loiter on the bank like a fool" and doesn't have the guts to "let them see her heading home." She's the classic adolescent and the classic Tower character—deeply ambivalent about human bonding, she tries to break away and finds herself trapped.

Turner's pioneer is aggressive by necessity: To succeed, he acquired, in Turner's phrasing, "that coarseness and strength … that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil." Tower's characters have inherited the frontier mentality, but the wilderness they're taking on is no longer a physical space: It's other people and themselves. Their aggression is not so much willed as impelled, and while the pioneer at least creates something—a cabin, then a town—before leaving it all behind, Matthew, Jacey, and the rest only tear things down. Nor does Tower give them the solacing illusion that in this destructive process, they are claiming their freedom. It's a bleak state of affairs, alleviated for the reader—though not for pillagers themselves—by the sharp, brutal clarity of the author's prose.