Book Review: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

David Wroblewski's first novel Edgar Sawtelle takes some effort in the early chapters, but if one is patient, it becomes an addictive page-turner. In the prologue. a nameless armed serviceman seeks out a herbalist in Pusan, South Korea, to procure a deadly poison. The year is 1952. The purpose of the poison is left unstated.

With chapter one the reader finds himself in the backwoods of northern Wisconsin. Now it is 1919. The grandfather of the eponymous hero whimsically buys a piece of property from a man named Schultz, who had tried without success to make a living as a dairy farmer. John Sawtelle married, began with careful eugenics to raise a breed that became known as the Sawtelle dogs. This involved transforming Schultz's barn into a kennel. John and Mary Sawtelle also reared two sons.

Claude and Edgar Sawtelle were "as different from one another as night and day." When their widowed father retired and moved to town, Edgar, whose name was abbreviated to Gar, stayed to run the kennel and produce, and train more of the much sought-after Sawtelle dogs. Claude left, they thought for good. He joined the military and served in Korea.

The title character is the son of Gar and Trudy, who married in their nid-thirties. After two miscarriages, Edgar is born mute but capable of hearing and otherwise normal. At about the same time, one of the Sawtelle dogs whelped and produced a female puppy named Almondine. Young Edgar and Almondine become inseparable while Edgar is still in his crib.

As the boy matures, he and his family master sign language as do all of the dogs. Edgar is able to read and write. He soon learns to help Trudy with the training of the succession of dogs, who respond to his signals as readily as they do to Gar and Trudy's spoken commands. Early on, Edgar is assigned the job of naming the dogs using a large dictionary as a source book.

A close friend of the family is the local veterinarian, Doctor Papineau, who has a son named Glen, perhaps twice the age of Edgar. Little mention is given to Edgar's primary education, which must have been problematic for a mute child in a rural area without access to special schooling. Glen matures into a huge hulk of a man, a wrestling champion in school, and in time becomes the local sheriff.

About a third of the way into the novel, some (but far from all) readers pick up on the fact that they are reading a thrice-told tale. A fellow named Shakespeare wrote a play about a ruler named King Hamlet who had a son with the same name and was married to a woman named Gertrude. King Hamlet had a brother named Claudius, who got away with poisoning his brother the king and soon after married the queen. Shakespeare based his tragic masterwork on a 13th century account, Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, or History of the Danes.

All this is paralleled in Edgar Sawtelle. Dr. Papineau is Polonius.The dog Almondine corresponds to Ophelia even though she is unrelated to Glen, the Laertes figure.. Edgar is far less vocal than Hamlet, but equally distressed by his mother's remarriage and suspicious of Claude. The ghost of Gar Sawtelle makes appearances.

Edgar convinces himself of his stepfather/uncle's guilt in a way similar to Hamlet's staging of the Mousetrap. Edgar leaves home with three dogs and the intention of walking to Canada as Hamlet had traveled to England. There is a stray dog named Forte on the fringe of the story who plays a role similar to that of Fortinbras. Rather than destroy the suspense for future readers, I will leave the plot line at this point.

Stylistically Wroblewski's prose and imagery are captivating even when sometimes tending toward the color purple. Incredibly, his proofreaders and editors overlooked a half dozen identical grammatical errors. The past tense verb "laid" is among the most common errors in spoken English. Like a member of the "'between you and I' school of English speakers who think if it sounds wrong, it must be right," Wroblewski repeatedly uses the verb "lay" when "laid" is called for.

I grew accustomed to his occasional long and complicated sentences. For example, at one climactic point Trudy is struggling in the grasp of Glen, who has her in a wrestling hold. "She began to think it wasn't Glen holding her at all but the black vine, grown now thick and strong pressing its roots into the soil to draw the earth tight against her and outward then in all directions so that its tendrils pinched and grabbed at time itself and time, like a slowly scrolling stage backdrop, became entangled; and the great proscenium where upstage all manner of machinery and instruments nameless and never before seen lay roughly strewn."

Happily, Edgar's inability to speak has made him the keenest of observers and the novel is packed with rich imagery distinguishing the individual dogs and depicting the countryside I share the sentiment expressed by Stephen King on the back cover where he says, "I closed the book with regret readers feel only after experiencing the best stories. It's over, you think, and I won't read another this good for a long, long time." Also I am a sucker for dog stories. I fell in love with Almondine.