Edgar hates his uncle more with each passing day. He makes himself indispensable to the business, and insinuates himself into Trudy’s bed. Claude has served in the military and has done time in prison, apparently for dog-fighting. Edgar and his mother, Trudy, try to maintain the family’s dog-breeding and -training operation, but when Trudy contracts pneumonia, they call on Gar’s younger brother, Claude, to help out. The novel’s popularity stems in large part from its breakneck narrative energy, although once you’ve caught on to the Hamlet angle, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that the Sawtelles will not end happily.Īs the novel begins, Edgar’s father, Gar, dies suddenly of an apparent brain aneurysm. The young Edgar’s beloved intimate is not a young woman named Ophelia but a dog named Almondine, part of a milling populace of large canines into whom three generations of Sawtelles have bred uncanny qualities of individual character and the capacity for moral choice. That is, it does so insofar as such a recapitulation can be achieved with a hero fourteen years old and mute from birth who lives in the Wisconsin boondocks in 1972. Perhaps Miss Winfrey has not yet heard of Shakespeare-he is, after all, no Steinbeck-and therefore neglected to mention that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle vigorously recapitulates the story of Hamlet. Up there with Steinbeck and even Harper Lee.” Thus Melville, Fitzgerald, Bellow are dispatched to Palookaville, and Wroblewski ascends among the gods.

She guaranteed his book’s commercial success by making it an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and supported the choice with her trademark élan: “I think that this is right up there with the greatest American novels ever written. After the book was launched by a wildly enthusiastic notice in the Times, Wroblewski then had the extreme good fortune of winning the esteem of today’s most influential literary critic, Miss Oprah Winfrey. It was the first novel by Wroblewski, a forty-eight-year-old software developer from Colorado who worked on the book for ten years. David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle was last summer’s megahit literary novel, rising as high as number five on the New York Times fiction best-seller list, and remaining suspended in that golden empyrean until this March.

The story of edgar sawtelle