The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Harper-Collins, 2008) is a grand American novel that swept me away to a land I’ve never seen (northern Wisconsin) and dropped me into a story I’ve never read. For days I couldn’t work, think or sleep very well; I could only read this riveting saga. I was completely mesmerized by this tale of fathers, sons, crimes, apparitions, small towns and the mysterious relationship between people and dogs.
Gar and Trudy Sawtelle own a beautiful ninety-acre farm, where they raise dogs, just as Gar’s father did. “Sawtelle dogs” have been systematically bred for decades. They are very smart, loyal, and protective companions. The Sawtelles also want to raise children. After years of heartbreak, Edgar is born. Like the dogs, he is very smart, loyal, protective, and…mute.
When Edgar is barely in his teens, Gar’s brother Claude is released from prison and ends up at the Sawtelle place. Like ink in water, dark poison smokes into the story. Old family secrets and two deaths throw Edgar, and three Sawtelle dogs, into a great escape through the woods. The reader becomes hungry and hunted. We are desperate – stealing, hiding, scheming, inventing and terribly reliant on the kindness of strangers.
Finally, Edgar goes home. The final act of this drama includes a mother and child reunion, a spectacular burning barn, coiled intrigue that strikes like a rattlesnake, and a very moving interaction between this earthly life and the next one.
This was, for me, the most runaway train reading experience since Unbroken. I couldn’t wait to get back to that place and those people. Certain scenes gripped me almost physically – like Edgar, frantic to save a life and knowing he can’t make a sound, dials 911 in wild desperation. When the operator answers, he violently slams his fist into his own chest trying to force some kind of intelligible sound to come out. His dog, Almondine, watching his struggle starts barking to try to help. That scene carries a universal sense of urgency and heartbreak.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a great novel; it gives us a 20th century Shakespearean story, characters who make us care, a full engagement of all our senses, and poetic descriptions of land, machines, rituals, and weather – “By then the yard was in full morning light, the lawn a beaded pelt of water.”
At 562 pages, the book is longer than most modern novels, but not a page too long. You will read the last 100 pages slowly; you don’t want these people to go away.
