The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is famous for cribbing the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The ‘king’ (Edgar’s father) is murdered by his brother Claude (Claudius) who then beds the father’s wife, Trudy (Gertrude). Edgar is the half-mad prince who accidentally kills ‘Polonius’ (a veterinarian named Papineau).  Edgar later befriends a fellow named Henry (Horatio), and predictably, Edgar’s father appears as a ghost to tell Edgar that he was murdered by Claude.  No Ophelia is ordered to a nunnery, but the ending is true to form, the stage littered with corpses as the curtain falls.

The language of the novel is not Shakespearean, nor is the bard’s wit or insight apparent, nor even is the story development. So a reader is left wondering what the point was of the Hamlet analogy in the first place. It certainly deflates any dramatic tension that might have resided in Wroblewski’s tale. Are plot structures so rare now that they must be imported?

I think the answer is found in the appended interview with the author. After years of working on this, his first novel, without any writing experience, he got stuck and gave it up several times, then finally enrolled in a MFA program, where it became his thesis.  It is indeed a novel that has the smell of MFA on it: writing for the sake of pointless writing.

It’s also a very slow start. I don’t mind a little backstory but when a novel set in the 1970’s begins with the main character’s grandfather in 1919, you know it’s going to be a long slog.

The descriptions of upper Wisconsin were often lovely and you’ll recognize Door County if you’ve ever been there, but how far can that carry a 600-page novel?

Edgar is mute, but otherwise a fully enabled fourteen-year-old. Why mute? What does that add to the story?  Aside from ‘writerly interest,’ it seems to be a device to make Edgar somehow ‘closer’ to the dogs his family raises, trains, and sells. He seems to understand the dog-mind intimately, and we’re supposed to believe that ‘dogs are people too, they just can’t talk.’  The anthropomorphism that saturates the novel supports that reading.

I’ve had dogs, trained a few, not to ‘Sawtelle standards’ but enough to know that while they are remarkably empathic, they do not have human cognition, not by any reach of the imagination.  Nevertheless, in this story, the main dog, Almondine, even has her own chapters with her own POV in which she is revealed to have such thoughts as,

‘She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time.’

It’s always nice to know what dogs are thinking, but in this story, if they have fully reflective consciousness and interior language, why make Edgar mute? That device is not needed if the dogs are already musing problems of existential philosophy and we already knew dogs can’t talk. These dogs also learn to read ASL so they can understand Edgar.  They are special dogs, no doubt about it.

Dogs aside, the human characters in the novel march through their assigned Shakespearean roles like wooden puppets.  Claudius murdered the king to assume the throne, of course but why did Claude murder Edgar’s father, a struggling farmer and kennel owner?  No crown to be had there.  A convincing motive is never suggested, not even lust for Edgar’s mother.

Likewise, despite at least three POV chapters from Trudy, I was unable to discern a hint about her feelings for Claude.  As for Edgar himself, is he nuts or not nuts?  That is the question.  He sees ghosts and acts irrationally, but hey, he’s only fourteen and much can be forgiven.  Hamlet pretended to be crazy so he could get the goods on Claudius, and then after a while, it wasn’t clear if he really had gone mad. Edgar has no excuse for emotional behavior other than being an adolescent.

The novel did make me consider, for the umpteenth time, what I think a novel is supposed to be. Are six hundred pages of grammatically correct sentences in a well-worn plot sufficient?  Apparently, yes, but while that low bar seems to satisfy many, it’s insufficient for me. I expect, in a literary novel, to be told a story that leads me to consider what it means to be a human. What does this novel say?  ‘Being a person is not much different from being a dog.’ Fair enough. That could be an interesting answer, but this author, this novel, did not convince me of it.

Wroblewski, David (2008). The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. New York: Ecco/Harper Collins; 566 pp.