Tales of Iceland and Fire Alarms: Four New Novels

Wall Street Journal

04-04-2025

It says a good bit about Nathaniel Ian Miller's gifts as a storyteller that he can take what on the surface looks like unpromising material—say, the history of hay-making in Iceland—and turn that straw into narrative gold. Mr. Miller's 'Red Dog Farm' has many examples of such alchemy in following Orri, a young man who has chosen the hardscrabble, hard-ground, hard-luck life that is cattle-raising near the Arctic Circle.
Orri's father, Pabbi, a dour but loving farmer who 'experienced life as a slow leak, a gradual drying out of hope,' and his sympathetic mother, Mamma, a college professor, wanted something different, something more, for their only child. Nonetheless, after his first semester at the University of Iceland, Orri bails on higher education. This defection is driven in part by a desire to help Pabbi, who has been beaten down by outdated equipment, needy livestock and the unforgiving climate. But mostly it is homesickness. 'I was young,' Orri says. 'It seemed that farming could be simple. It certainly seemed that it could be beautiful.'
The charming, episodic 'Red Dog Farm' is populated by outsiders and eccentrics, among them Orri's grandmother, Amma, a Jewish doctor from Lithuania, and Ketill, a neighbor who, if one were not vigilant, 'would take it upon himself to 'help' with the animals or the machines,' often with disastrous results. There's also Stefán, another farmer neighbor, who years ago unaccountably took it in his head to breed odd colors into his sheep—the whys and wherefores gripped the locals for a good long while—and Stefán's daughter Rúna, who confides to Orri that she's gay and importunes him to find her a girlfriend.
Orri himself is looking for a girlfriend. He finds a prospect online. Their long emails become long phone calls until Orri mucks it up—or so it seems—when he asks for a photo. Romance is as dicey a business as farming. Is it a compliment to a novel to say that it feels like a memoir? A compliment is what's intended.