Wroblewski’s most impressive accomplishments here is to exert a strong, seemingly effortless gravitational pull.
You’d only be disappointed in the details.”)Ĭredit. (The only answer Edgar can get to the question of how they met is: “In a good way. His parents are beguiling but mysterious. In a coming-of-age book that pays rapt attention to the power of communication, there are things that Edgar at first simply cannot understand. King’s Maine as they do with Shakespeare’s Denmark. This book’s brief encounters with prophecy and the supernatural have as much to do with Mr. But “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” is by no means “Hamlet” with hounds. When an unhappy fate befalls Edgar’s father, Gar, the suspicions of this now 14-year-old boy are aroused. Edgar adores his mother, Trudy, and resents his long-lost uncle, Claude. Wroblewski gives this family the “Hamlet” treatment, in general terms though not slavishly derivative ones.
Within the Sawtelle household, Edgar is by far the easiest person to understand.
It’s just that his dialogue, unlike theirs, is presented without quotation marks. Edgar speaks as clearly as any of the book’s other human characters do. Wroblewski has a deft, natural way of conveying Edgar’s relationship to language. He has no trouble making himself understood to his loved ones, whether they have two legs or four.Īnd Mr. Edgar speaks his own private sign language to people and dogs alike. Although Edgar’s condition is a terrible liability at certain crucial plot junctures, it is more often a blessing. Wroblewski puts Edgar on a warm, cozy, paw-boxing basis with the Sawtelle dogs by rendering the boy mute from birth. But the voice heard in “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” sounds like no one else’s as this book creates its enthralling, warmly idiosyncratic story.ĭavid Wroblewski Credit. Wroblewski happens to have borrowed, here and there, from Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Richard Russo, Stephen King and the 1934 dog-breeding book “Working Dogs.” And he writes as if he grew up in a library well stocked with great novels of the prairie. Absent the few dates and pop-cultural references that place the book somewhere in the post-Eisenhower 20th century, its unmannered style, emotional heft and sweeping ambition would keep it timeless. Written over a decade by the heretofore unknown David Wroblewski and arriving as a bolt from the blue, this is a great, big, mesmerizing read, audaciously envisioned as classic Americana. It’s an even better way to get acquainted with the most enchanting debut novel of the summer. That’s a good way for a boy to meet a dog.
Between the honey-colored slats of the crib a whiskery muzzle slides forward until its cheeks pull back and a row of dainty front teeth bare themselves in a ridiculous grin.” “This will be his earliest memory,” “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” says about its title character.
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