The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Book Review

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski, is a rather hefty (566 pages) first novel that is not at all a heavy read. I rather cringed when I realized this was yet another handicapped boy and dog story, yet the story managed to be full of energy and did not succumb to syrupy sentimentality at all. I am going to put right upfront, however, that this novel is the story of a horrible tragedy. I wish I had understood that as I was going through the captivating lyrical parts that so seduced me at first.

Young John Sawtelle came out of WW1 with an idea of breeding an entirely new breed of dog, a sort of uber-dog, which he calls a Sawtelle. He raises his dogs and his family in a small Wisconsin town. The protagonist, Edgar, John's grandson, is fourteen when we join his life. He is congenitally mute but his parents are grateful he is otherwise healthy.

It has fallen to Edgar's parents, Gar and Trudy, to run the dog breeding business, and they do it as both lifestyle and life choice.

We see Edgar communicating through signs with both his loving parents and the dogs, particularly one Sawtelle female named Almondine. The reader is drawn into a world of trees and family and dogs who, fortunately, are kept canine in personality and behavior, even while they are communicating with their owners.

Then Edgar's uncle, Gar's older brother, Claude, returns from the military, and in true Hamlet-style, the family is broken. Gar's father gives Claude a job and a place to stay, but arguments and disagreements are tearing the family apart.

Then Gar dies, Edgar has a brief supernatural encounter, and becomes convinced that his father's heart attack was actually foul play. As he plots and plans for revenge, he begins to lose relationships. His mother ends up in Claude's bed. Edgar's relationship with Almondine becomes oddly distant.

Edgar is training a young litter of Sawtelles. Things become too bad and he is forced to flee with three of his young dogs into the forests. For three months he and they are in the forest, struggling against starvation and scared of discovery. Again mystic and thriller elements are brought into the story, including a visit by "a water-shimmer."

Edgar is summoned home by Almondine's spirit, to the tragic end of a profound man-dog relationship. There were times in the book that Mr. Wroblewski perhaps described a few too many parts of a scene. It is a writing sin Hemingway tended to commit. The Hamlet elements are visible for all to see, but the writing was well done enough and original enough that I did not see the tragic end as inevitable. Instead, the first half of the book was very much a rite-of-passage book about Edgar.

The dogs are made fully alive, with personality and character, yet never anthropomorphised. The mystic scenes were also amazingly well written, bringing the reader right along with Edgar into the suspenseful perspective.