The Dog Whisperer

By MIKE PEED

Near the beginning of the fifth act of “Hamlet,” just a few lines after he fondles Yorick’s skull, the Prince of Denmark grows distraught at the sight of Ophelia’s burial and avows he’ll do anything to avenge the death of his love — including eat a crocodile. When his boasts are taken for psychosis, Hamlet threatens, “Let Hercules himself do what he may, / The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.” Here, David Wroblewski, in his ambitious first novel, uses the framework of Shakespeare’s tragedy to grant that patient dog its day.

“The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” is not alone, of course, in its reanimation of “Hamlet” (see Matt Haig’s recent novel “The Dead Fathers Club,” for example), but it is surely the first to populate it with so many hounds. Set chiefly in the early 1970s, near the Chequamegon National Forest in Wisconsin, the novel tells the story of the Sawtelle family, which over the generations has strived to establish, through an experimental amalgam of breeding, training and mysticism, the ne plus ultra of the companion dog. The goal is to produce free-willed, “choice making” creatures, ones that, having “learned that a certain expression on a person’s face meant that something interesting lay behind them, or in another room,” will pursue the action best for both themselves and their owners. Wroblewski, who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and until recently worked as a software engineer, wrote his novel over the course of a decade, and he takes as much inspiration from Darwin and Mendel as he does from Kipling and London. The result is a sprawling, uneven work, at times brilliant but elsewhere sentimental and tedious.

After several miscarriages, Trudy Sawtelle gives birth to Edgar, a boy who, like the family’s dogs, can hear but cannot speak. The source of Edgar’s disability is never understood — it is one of the book’s many mysteries — but the muteness enables an almost supernatural connection between him and the animals. Edgar is smart, adamantly curious about both the natural and human world, and the language he creates is a resourceful patchwork of learned and invented signs. (With striking effect, Wroblewski renders Edgar’s statements without quotation marks.)

In the book’s early sections, Wroblewski presents an idyll — Edgar and his father stroll serenely through the early morning woods, Edgar fumbles through the care of his first litter — that can seem mawkish and superficial. Edgar’s father, Gar, is a vague sketch of benevolence and probity, and the outside world exists only in periodic pop culture references — Roger Miller, a man on the moon. Yet how can paradise be destroyed if it doesn’t first exist?

The destroyer enters in the form of Edgar’s uncle, Claude, who, if a more complex character than his brother, is nonetheless depicted with a disconcerting number of clichés. The night Claude arrives, Edgar has a nightmare: “Claude spoke in a voice low and quiet, his face divided by a rippling line of cigarette smoke, his words a senseless jumble. But when Edgar looked down, he found himself standing in a whelping pen surrounded by a dozen pups, wrestling and chewing one another; and then, just as he lapsed into deep, blank sleep, they stood by the creek and one by one the pups waded into the shallow water and were swept away.” The stream of words is graceful, but it amounts to the most obvious foreshadowing. After the “ferociously solitary” Claude repeatedly bickers with Gar, and Gar abruptly dies, Edgar knows but cannot prove Claude murdered his father.

Wroblewski’s literary skill is most apparent in his intoxicating descriptions of the bucolic setting. “The sapphire sky above floated a small, lone cloud made orange by the sunrise,” he writes in one dreamlike sequence. “Sparrows cartwheeled over the wet field like glazier’s points against the sky, and the swallows nesting in the eaves plunged into the morning air.” Similarly, Wroblewski’s handling of the ghost scene (“His head, his torso. Arms held away from his body. All formed by raindrops suspended and instantly replaced”) and his transformation of “the play’s the thing” into an ingenious skit of syringe-clenching dogs display a delightful legerdemain. The book’s climax is a high-voltage ride of multiple perspectives and shifting time frames.

Wroblewski seems aware of the two outsize risks he has undertaken — not merely deciding to retell “Hamlet,” but combining it with a near categorically twee subject: slobbering, tail-wagging dogs. He handles his task with impressive subtlety, even when allowing the narrative a dog’s-eye view. But while sections of this book achieve a piercing elegance, the novel too often slides into the torpid mode of field guides and breeding manuals, with Wroblewski’s penchant for detail getting in the way of a full exploration of his characters’ emotional cores. This concern with the exterior frequently eclipses his attention to the interior, a self-indulgence that the first-time author may well outgrow. Even Shakespeare had to first produce “Titus Andronicus.”

Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

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