Book Review: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Here’s an idea: Let’s take William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, right? And let’s pull out all the key bits: an indecisive and tragic hero, a poisoned father, the ghost of that poisoned father, an accidental murder of a close friend, and an usurping uncle who marries the hero’s mother. Oh, oh, and that whole “play within a play” scene where Hamlet tries to guilt his uncle into confessing murder. Don’t forget that. NOW, let’s retell THAT story, except instead of rotten Denmark let’s place it in rural Wisconsin during the 1950s and instead of a kingdom let’s make it a dog breeding business and let’s replace Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a couple of dogs. There. Now you’ve basically got The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

And you know, all smirk aside that’s not necessarily a bad hook. Plenty of great books have used that trope of retelling well-known stories from religious texts, legends, Greek plays, and the like. My problem with this book actually lies completely in the writing. Specifically, the plot is agonizingly slow, meandering, and just plain boring. There’s flashes of action and some neat character development, but it’s completely buried under meandering prose where nothing happens for scores of pages at a time. I don’t need all this detail on dog breeding and the letters Edgar’s dad wrote to other dog breeders, for example. It’s not necessary. Stop it.

Relatedly, Wroblewski has an annoying habit of introducing elements to the story that get a lot of attention, then just sort of sit there like a lump and eventually get left behind. This goes hand in hand with his habit of over reaching in his attempts at writing florid and poetic prose where he goes on and on about a scene or an internal monologue long after we’ve gotten the point or the appropriate impression. And for all that detail and introspection, the characters didn’t even really feel that fleshed out or detailed. Claude and even Edgar himself are only given superficial motives for their actions.

And don’t even get me started about anthropomorphizing the dogs in the story to the point where I can’t believe they’re actually dogs any more. Just …no.

The end result is that the book feels mostly disjointed, meandering, and not quite sure where it’s going. It needed some serious editing and reigning in. So I really recommend against this one. Hanging huge slabs of fatty meat on Hamlet’s bones doesn’t make for another masterpiece.