THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
David Wroblewski
Ecco
Fiction
ISBN: 9780061374227

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Is THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE as good as you’ve heard it is? Definitely! Does it suffer from its pacing? No. There is an interlude in the middle of the narrative that seems to approach the status of overly long but ultimately skirts it. Is it a scholarly work? Oh, yes. It is a beautifully told novel that will raise every emotion you possess to the forefront --- from joy to anger to horror to sorrow --- but it says so much about nobility and dishonor, and good and evil, that semesters could be spent upon its study as a parable or as a metaphor, and still other semesters on what author David Wroblewski has wrought and how he did so.

THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE begins with an enigmatic, seemingly unrelated prologue set in Korea in 1952. Note well these first few pages; the realization of their significance is not entirely clear until about midway through this long work. But when Wroblewski deftly removes the scales from his readers’ eyes, the meaning becomes all too clear and echoes both forward and backward in the narrative.

The primary story deals with Gar and Trudy Sawtelle, and their son Edgar. Gar and Trudy (and, when he comes of early age, Edgar) raise dogs. Anyone who has ever invested in anything that eats knows that such an endeavor is not easy even under the best of circumstances. The Sawtelles, however, are breeding a special type of dog through exhausting and careful genetic study.

Gar is gently and wonderfully eccentric, Trudy is sweetly sturdy and practical, and Edgar is intelligent far beyond his years. Unable to speak for reasons that medical science cannot explain, Edgar communicates through writing and signing, and forms a special bond with the dogs that transcends traditional boundaries. The family, living on a small but efficient farm in rural Wisconsin in the late 1960s and early 1970s, continues the dog breeding practices and variations of Gar’s father, which they meticulously document for future use.

Their routine is interrupted by the somewhat sudden appearance of Claude, Gar’s brother. Old wounds in the relationship between the siblings are reopened, causing a silent but roiling disturbance beneath the waters of the family’s life and routine. When Gar dies suddenly of an apparent stroke, Edgar’s insistence of Claude’s involvement seems delusional at first. Edgar initiates proof of Claude’s culpability, one that is brilliant in its execution but spectacularly and horribly flawed in its result, causing Edgar to flee the farm with a trio of dogs in the hope of leaving the horror of his memory behind.

Edgar, though, is possessed of an honor and fortitude beyond his years. He is confronted with a storm that fulfills an eerie prophecy and serves as a cryptic symbol for what is to come. Returning to the family farm, and the kennels in which he has invested so much of himself, Edgar confronts the puzzle of his father’s death and his own uneasy destiny in a climax that, slowly played out over the novel’s final hundred pages, will leave the reader stunned and haunted.

Wroblewski has much to say here, in a very subtle way, about the nature of evil and the ways in which it finds its triumph and the nobility of creatures that are at once greater and lesser than human beings. Reminiscent of the best of Steinbeck, Shakespeare and (yes) James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE cannot be read without mentally making room for it on a shelf reserved for great works. You will remember whole passages verbatim, hearing them echo in your mind even as you sleep and, for better or worse, when you wake.

    --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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