Book review: ‘The Story of Edgar Sawtelle’

Note: This review contains some spoilers.

I initially rated this book three stars, but after giving it some thought and when comparing it to literary classics — the standard by which I judge all novels — I downgraded it to two stars.

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This highly ambitious work, a loose retelling of Hamlet in rural Wisconsin, didn’t quite the deliver, both on the quality of the writing and the plot. At times, the writing approached the exceptional, particularly when we got to see the point of view of Edgar’s dog, Almondine, or when Edgar saw his dead father, but those moments were fleeting. More times than not, the plot seemed to drag a bit, especially during Edgar’s time away from home in the forest with the dogs. Other than Edgar and perhaps Gar, the father, the characters seemed a bit flat. Claude, Gar’s brother, could have been a complex character as the scheming deviant, but his motivations aren’t fleshed out very well. How does a guy go from a blacksheep-type figure in the family, who has some arguments with his brother, to a calculating killer? Why is Claude so caught up with Trudy? Was he motivated by jealousy or lust or was he just a sociopath? After the incident with Gar, why is Trudy so resigned to stay with her dead husband’s brother, especially at the expense of her own son’s sanity? Are there no available males back in town?

In 640 pages, these questions could have been more fully explored, but they weren’t, and these are the nuances that separate classic literature from some works of modern fiction that, thanks to low expectations from the public, somehow make it on the best seller list.

While Wroblewski did a good job developing the deep relationships between Edgar, Trudy, his father and Almondine, I don’t think we saw enough of that between Trudy and Claude, which is a pairing that was central in the novel’s conclusion. As for the rest of the plot, the logistics at the end were difficult to visualize. Are we to believe that a blinded policeman, Glen, would or even could pin down a caring mother, while her son risked his life trying to reclaim documents from inside a burning barn? While Claude clearly had evil intentions, we get the impression that Glen wanted to kidnap Edgar for questioning, not be complicit in a murder, so once Glen realized that he had become tangled up with Trudy on the ground, even if he was in immense pain, why did he not just release her?

All that said, the imagery and the descriptive language at the end was stellar — a high point in the writing — and I liked how Wroblewski wraps up the novel from the viewpoint of the remaining Sawtelle dogs. Unlike some reviewers, I don’t knock the book simply for being a tragedy because life, one way or the other, almost always ends in tragedy. But for all its high ambition in summoning the muse of Shakespeare, the book fell a few degrees short in my estimation.