In God’s Dogs (SMU Press 2009), author Mitch Wieland’s protagonist, Ferrell Swan, examines his complicated relationship with himself, the ghost of his father, his ex-wife, and his adult stepson from the vantage of his self-imposed exile in a desolate, rugged corner of Idaho.
Swan is a sixty-something from Ohio who checks out of his high school teaching job and third marriage and buys a piece of land as close to nowhere as he can find – the high desert and canyon lands of southern Idaho’s sprawling Owyhee County. He builds a cabin and barn and buys a small flock of sheep. The stories that comprise the novel were apparently written as stand-alone fiction; according to the cover God’s Dogs is a “novel in short stories.” I doubt I would have notice (or cared) if I had not been told, but in any event each “short story” is presented in chronological order featuring Swan as the protagonist and offering up a reappearing central cast of characters. Swan’s periods of self-reflective solitude are disrupted by intrusive appearances by Swan’s vibrant, head-strong ex-wife, Rilla, his reckless adult stepson, Lavon, and a small band of neighboring misfits reckoning with their own fears and insecurities in the lonesome desert. God’s Dogs, by the way, are the coyotes who frequent Swan’s desert and become a talisman for both Swan and Rilla.
There’s plenty of brooding in God’s Dogs, but the novel is briskly paced. Maybe because of the novel-in-short-stories framework. Maybe in spite of it. Don’t know. Swan is a sympathetic protagonist: he seems to genuinely care that he has failed to give Rilla the emotional commitment she desires, and he’s sufficiently self-aware to recognize that his conduct is not unlike the emotional detachment his own flawed father had inflicted upon him. Swan’s detachment extends to the charming but fragile Lavon, who plainly yearns for Swan to close the distance between the two. But Lavon lacks the maturity to mend the relationship without help and Swan can’t muster the energy to shoulder the burden, a mutual failure that becomes the backdrop to Swan and Rilla’s greatest confrontation.
God’s Dogs relies heavily on sense of place: The Owyhee desert, complete with its coyotes and wild mustangs, is forever at the center of the novel, helping to shape and define the solace and loneliness in inhabitants find in its stark landscape. The book is a satisfying journey through this physical landscape as well as the contours of Ferrell Swan’s complicated relationships.
RCM
