Whip and Spur by Iver Arnegard (review)

Iver Arnegard is quintessentially the wanderlust writer, having lived as a ranch hand, dishwasher, wilderness guide, and woodcutter, holed up in places as remote and wild as backwoods Alaska. It is this drifting and at times trapping edginess that Whip and Spur captures. The short story collection is profound in its juxtapositions, at once brief in length and epic in breadth. The stories prove sad and constricting, with bleak landscapes drawn around characters desperate with yearning, trapped by situation, geography, despair. Yet taken as a whole (the collection craves to be read as a thematic cycle), ultimate salvation is achieved by figuratively leaning into a never-warming nor -ceasing wind.

The northern plains and mountains—desolate, lonely, dark, ice-and wind-ravaged—beat down characters who do not so much attempt to tame the landscape as simply survive it. And this is finally what Arnegard’s characters all strive for, to survive the storms of loneliness, spiritual corruption, and despair. In “Ice Fishing,” a woman briefly wanders into the farm and life of a man because she’s been told in town he “fixes things” (5). The piece develops largely framed by stark imagery: a male protagonist on the edge of wilderness, on the edge of his life, cold and alone . . . again and again. The tension that Arnegard establishes (I feel the ice and wind, the growing darkness, the encroaching fear of solitude and elements) renders themes with a painful clarity. Characters in each piece struggle within their landscapes as they flail within their lives.

The protagonists run the gamut of edgy despair. Arnegard flawlessly draws the grotesquely desperate female character precariously perched upon raw northwestern plains, often pitting the home-bound female against the wanderer-hunter male. In “Recluse,” the narrator-protagonist is so desperately lonely that she takes in a drifter, takes him to her bed, allows him to rape her, and becomes addicted to his kind of love. “There are all kinds of hunger out here,” she claims (21), choosing, finally, suicide to avoid further solitude. The narrator-protagonist in “Bonesaw” faces continuous violence by her husband. Like the other female character, she discovers herself, finally, in the power of choice, determining the violent denouement for the story, shooting and killing the husband with the hunting gun of which he has denied her use. These women are strong yet tragically flawed.

This is a book of violence, yes. Stories of despair, certainly. But the collection is also one of archetypal redemption. Each piece explores the wind as it blows drifters, sadness, frustrations, death, poverty, and spirits in and out. “Made of Land and Water” illustrates the necessity to leave the landscape as the only way to achieve redemption, and “What Rises” closes the collection by dispersing even the prose style, leaving readers to float away on a poetic wind. For a West Texas reader who cut her literary teeth on Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind, Iver Arnegard’s Whip and Spur holds me sway.