Reviewed by Heidi Naylor

God's Dogs
Mitch Wieland
Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 2009
978-0-87074-553-9, Paperback
275 pages, $22.50

In the opening pages of Mitch Wieland's novel-in-stories, "spectacular failure" Ferrell Swan spends an afternoon ear-tagging sheep with his wayward stepson, Levon. At Ferrell's insistence, the two begin at daybreak and work through long, dusty hours to keep the hounds of sorrow at bay.

A mute sheep, held by Levon and ear-punched by Ferrell, "shudders at the instant of bright pain, then looks on like nothing's happened."

It is an apt metaphor for Ferrell's habitual inclination to stand the heartaches of life with emotional retreat. After years of stormy marriage to ex-wife Rilla, endless futile efforts to keep Levon out of trouble, and a lackluster career teaching high school history, Ferrell now retreats physically as well. In this “steep downhill slide of his life,” he has abandoned the trimmed neighborhoods of small-town Ohio and moved to a hundred-acre moonscape of scrubland near southwest Idaho's Owyhee range.

But escape does not confer peace, and the ties that bind us are not so easily cut. As the stories unfold, memory and regret are laid bare for Ferrell by each daily sweep of sun and wind. His depleted heart is asked again and again to take on the burdens as well as the transcendence of family. Levon’s appearance is complicated as he quickly fathers a child with the sexy wife of Ferrell's neighbor. Ex-wife Rilla makes bold pilgrimages to and from Ferrell’s desert home, a place that, to the surprise of all involved, begins to make its claims on the soul.

The land itself is a character here, featuring the brutal extremes of weather as well as rattlesnakes, graceful hawks, wild mustangs, and a far-flung and ragtag assemblage of renegades and hermits.  It shelters, too, a pack of coyotes--God's dogs--who, according to Navajo legend, created the world.

The coyotes move in and out of the new landscape of Ferrell Swan, their peculiar brand of outcast, scrapper, and survivor slowly rebuilding his own broken hopes. In prose that is chiseled and windswept, full of desire and a harsh elegance, Wieland presents Ferrell's retreat as inversely resonant of the American dream of the West as the frontier of possibility.  Ferrell's dream is instead to escape from regret and responsibility. Near the novel’s close, he “drives through a blackness total and complete, the high desert invisible all around, though beyond his headlights he knows the road touches tomorrow.” Tomorrow, for the dreamer, is the convergence of “hopeful wish and absolute truth.” For Ferrell Swan, this convergence is astonishing in ways both lovely and sorrowful.

God's Dogs is the second novel by Wieland, who has achieved prominence as editor of the highly regarded Idaho Review literary magazine. Each of the ten stories comprising the novel appeared in literary magazines of strong reputation, and one story, "The Bones of Hagerman," was reprinted in the Best of the West 2009 anthology. Each can stand on its own as a complete and satisfying drama. Taken together, the stories present a unique and robust meditation on the ways love and land sustain us.

Heidi Naylor teaches creative writing and literature at Boise State University.