Even before The Story of Edgar Sawtelle was announced as a 2008 Oprah Book Club pic, it was one of seven novels short-listed for the 2008 Sargent First Novel Prize. I interviewed its author David Wroblewski by phone in late November, just before our Awards Dinner. David grew up in rural central Wisconsin, not far from the Chequamegon National Forest, where a large section of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is set. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in computer science and has worked as a software developer for over 25 years. He earned his master's degree from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Over the years he has lived in La Crosse, Minneapolis, and Austin, Texas. Currently, he makes his home in Colorado with the writer Kimberly McClintock.
What was the genesis of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle?
A slightly tricky question to answer. I had been writing short stories and I knew I wanted to try writing a novel and I had been casting about for months trying to decide what I cared enough about to spend that long writing about. I grew up around dogs, my parents had a dog kennel when I was a kids and I’m one of those people who can walk into a party of 50 people and one dog and go straight for the dog. There’s something very profound about our relationship with dogs. So I had a very vague notion that the novel would have something to do with dogs. Then I had what I call an idea package—it all landed in my mind in just a few hours. In a very short period of time the idea of a very structured story that draws part of its inspiration from Hamlet, but make the state in the story not the state of Denmark, but the state of some dogs. That was Day One for the novel. I knew very shortly thereafter that that was far too schematic, at least in terms of plot, that I didn’t want to simply sit down and copy out the plot of Hamlet. But that was essentially the starting point and it was a discovery process from then on, asking, “Who is this boy?” Why does he care so much about the dogs? What is his connection? Why are the dogs so important in the first place?
And all that came about through the natural course of writing and discovering as I was drafting what I wanted to talk about. That took several years, years that I consider preliminary work, pre-novel work, flailing attempts to get started. I realized I didn’t know how to writer at novel even though I’d been reading them all my life. But when I began to write one, a thousand questions came up about why a 500-page story doesn’t fall apart into 50 ten-page stories.
I read that it took you over a decade to write this. Was most of this that preliminary work you describe?
There were three phases. One was the early phase in which I would make attempt at chapters and come up against this basic question of what holds a novel together. When you sit down to write the beginning of new chapter, what should that first sentence and why. In a short story, the idea of coherence and the unitary experience of the reading of a short story seemed to me to be so self-evident that no one needed to explain that to me. So there was a lot of fumbling around in Phase One.
In Phase Two, I decideded I need to study formally. I’d read everything I could read,but wasn't getting where I needed to go and it was keeping me awake at night, so I enrolled in an The Warren Wilson MFA program. I was interested in it as a low-residency program because I was working full-time as a software developer. And I live in Colorado and love living here and didn’t want to relocate. So in phase Two, I spent two and half years in that program and during that time I asked every one of my great teachers this question: What is the idea of structure in a novel? What holds a novel together? It was finally in the last semester that I finally came upon an answer for myself and that’s when I date the real beginning o f the writing of the novel. That was 1998.
So what does hold a novel together? What was the answer for you?
For this novel, the answer is that the structure is a braid. What holds the novel together for me is not plot, not formal attributes like chapter structure. And that discovery was important to me because I had envisioned the book initially as a novel in five acts, and, as it turned out, that was not a helpful metaphor. What was a helpful was the idea of a braid, of many small threads of concern, whether concern with a thematic element or an image or a person or a word or a phrase, surfacing and then submerging and then surfacing again later in some slightly different form and having that happen over and over again. And if you have enough strands in the braid these things intermingle and almost magically it holds together.
I came to this after spending a fair amount of time studying The Great Gatsby and the letters Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Max Perkins. Before he began the novel, he wrote Perkins saying that he wanted to write something “intricately patterned.” I’m not sure what Fitzgerald meant because he never expanded on that, but I supplied an answer for myself after dissembling Gatsby and putting it back together many times. Then I looked at many other novels. I looked very closely at Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, a wonderful, beautiful story.
So I had an answer. The novel is not a hierarchical structure, it’s a braid. I used to tell my teachers at Warren Wilson that while I understood the micro structure of an individual scene and understood the macrostructure--Freytag’s triangle and rising action and climax and all that--wat I needed was some middle structure. And that was wrong. The problem with the novel, really, is that it is an unnaturally long story, a ridiculously long story, and once you understand that’s the problem you’re solving, some things begin to fall out, begin to make sense.
When you describe your thinking and talk about structure, a little bit of the software developer is leaking through, it seems.
There are many, many things in the world of software development that are useful habits for a writer. But one of the things that in counterproductive is the software world’s obsession with modularity and reuse. You learn structural thinking as a maker of software and you think in terms of design and that’s all good--you have to hold these really complicated ideas in your head and the ideas have motion to them and you learn to imagine how the processes dovetail over time—very helpful skills that transfer into writing. But the regular modular structure used in the world of software would lead to terrible, terrible fiction.
Influences? What about Kipling?
Thanks for asking about Kipling. One of the things I asked myself when I began Edgar Sawtelle was, “Why do I crave this story?” And I knew that as a reader I wanted to read a really good story about people and their relationship to dogs. So I looked back to the stories I knew and didn’t find much that fit the bill—especially in contemporary fiction. But you could go back and find The Call of the Wild and the Kipling Stories--these tremendously interesting stories with tremendous heart in them. I grew up with the Jungle Book in all its different forms. My favorite was the version of the book as taken from the Disney movie. And at some point I discovered the real book. The poetry of the writing and the depth of feeling between Mowgli and Bageera and the wolf pack were very striking with me and I carried that with me. I took it as permission to operate somewhat outside the bounds of realism, to tell a story that had the hint of the flavor of a fable. Suffused through the novel, but especially in Edgar’s relationship to the dogs, is that sense of tenderness and kindness.
In addition, Edgar always seem so present, so immersed in the moment and that seems to come out of his relations to the dogs, but perhaps also because he is mute?
You’ve identified two main ingredients there. And they both have to do with language. Our relationships with our dogs are not mediated by language, at least not human language, but it is a highly communicative relationship. Some of my early research had to do with going to my veterinarian who I’ve now worked with for over 15 years and asking her the most absurd questions you can imagine, really dumb questions like "Why don’t dogs talk?" Is it physiological, does it have to do with neuro-anatomy, what is the essential barrier given that they are so communicative and you have such a sense of social understanding on their part? In a way it’s surprising that they don’t have any language at all. Ultimately she decided I wasn’t absolutely crazy and helped me understand.
So that was part of the decision to make Edgar mute. And the flip side is that dogs are absolutely spectacular observers of people, that is what they do and they are really good at it and they are better at observing us by far than we are at observing them. So what you call Edgar’s “presence” is what I in retrospect would say was my determination to construct a character who was as good at observing dogs as they are at observing us.
It’s also a book about people who are haunted. Can you talk about the ghosts in the novel?
I view every character in the story as haunted in some way or another. The whole idea of grief and love is to me a kind of a haunting. As so Trudy is surely haunted by Gar, although not literally; Claude is haunted by Gar; in a way Gar was haunted by Claude; and they are all haunted by the figure of Schultz, the farmer who created the land. Edgar is literally haunted more than once. In terms of the braid idea we talked about, one of the thematic strands is how each character is haunted.
For me it was a given that I was departing from realism. The idea was to use those tools where they were appropriate and set them aside where it became fun to do so, to be honest. I was working very intuitively and this was something that was developed over many drafts, understanding how to bring this aspect out. Sometimes I went a little too far, sometimes not far enough. I had to learn control of the medium and get control of the vehicle. Consequently, I had to go through many drafts and this rejection of realism is part of the reason it took me so long to write this book.
One of the most interesting and moving parts of the books recounts Edgar’s walk through Cheguamegon Forest. You grew up near there and it’s very beautiful and realistically drawn, but also works outside the real--as a magical place.
I make the connection in that section to Kipling. The fictional character Edgar relates to most is Mowgli. Part of why Edgar feels that he is returning to his natural state has to do with his connection to Mowgli.
in contrast, the farm in the story is exactly the farm I grew up on. It was a 92-acre farm, about half forested,with two fields, one to the west and one to the south, and there was an apple orchard and a barn. I essentially cleared it of my family and installed the Sawtelles, and that’s exactly how I think of it—as a stage set. In terms of narrative strategy, the idea was to keep the story and Edgar as confined as possible to that stage set until the beginning of the Chewamagon section, to bottle things up, so when he finally steps over that fence line and crosses that creek he is on a trajectory away from his world. But that time is the woods is how I recall my childhood there, wandering, branches slapping back at you, thinking how easy it would be to disappear into it.
How did the book come to print?
My agent is Eleanor Jackson and my editor is Lee Boudreaux at Ecco and I love them both. A writer at a workshop told me there was a young agent in his agency looking build her roster and that was Eleanor. I sent her a letter and the first chapter, and we hit it off. We did not make many changes to the book before she sent it out. I had just finished cutting the draft. I had been submitting for about a year at that point and the feedback was that a novel this long from an unknown writer would never get published. Agents would not take it on. Someone at a workshop then read and really liked it and said I should cut every page by 20%. I resisted that, At that point the novel was 250,000 words. I thought there must be plenty of novels that long. So I looked up Moby Dick and when I found that it was 212,000 words long I was aghast. So I made it my mission to make my book only as long as Moby Dick. It took me about four months to do that and that was the version I sent to Eleanor. I told her there was a lot of blood lost in that cutting process and I wasn’t sure I could do it again and asked her, if she could stand it, to try submitting it as it was. She agreed and Lee saw it at Ecco about nine months later and it was bought at auction in December 2006. Lee proceeded to wiggle every verb in the book and we shook out another 20,000 words. It’s now 192,000 words, so we took out a lot. I don’t know other editors, but Lee was fantastic.
Ecco has done a wonderful job of marketing the books and you had great blurbs from Richard Russo and Stephen King.
Rick Russo was one of the teachers I studied with at Warren Wilson along with Joan Silber, Margot Livesey, Ehud Havazelet, and Wilton Barnhart. Rick had been very generous over the years. After I got out of the program in 1998, I would send him an email every three years or so and let him know I was still working on the book. And he was always encouraging and generous with his time in taking emails and talking with someone who had graduated years earlier. I don’t know Stephen King, but I gather Lee had sent him an early version. And, of course, I was thrilled with his reaction.
How has the selection by Oprah’s book club affected you?
It hasn’t changed my day-to-day life. It’s great for the book, but my daily routine hasn’t been affected. They are a very efficient and very professional organization and the way they operate their book club is very impressive.
Has the success of the book made you feel part of the community of writers?
The truth is I have a writing group I meet with here. That includes Kimberly McClintock and Nancy Sullivan. We don’t critique each other’s work, but we read our work aloud to one another. I’m not involved in the academic writing community. I have a divided allegiance. So much of what I’ve learned about how to make things has come from the worlds of software and photography and I’m not eager to leave those worlds. I love making software. It’s enormously creative; the people are joy to work with. The really creative people are every bit as creative as anyone working in any other medium. I’m an amateur photographer and those are the places I draw inspiration from. The academic writing world doesn’t need someone else in it. If I don’t need to do that I shouldn’t do it, only people drawn to teaching should do that. It’s not what I have to contribute. Right now I’m writing fiction full-time, but I have my book on the ruby software programming language right here and I’m looking at it. The way it works for me is that I have these three creative outlets—writing, photography and software and there’s always one on the back burner, one on the front burner and one I’m switching off with when I get tired. So right now it’s writing and photography and software’s on the back burner, but there are still things I want to do software. I feel like it's really important to me to do all three.