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This is a doorstop of a book, 975 pages, and worth every minute of the time I spent immersed in it. It’s a prequel to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I remember reading avidly in 2008 Starting in 1919 and stretching to the early ‘60s, this novel traces the beginnings of Sawtelle’s family farm in Wisconsin where they ended up raising a unique type of mixed breed dog that proved extraordinarily responsive. There’s an extensive cast of characters including saturnine Frank, who lost an arm and a leg in the war and has little to live for. And Elbow (his last name), who is big, strong, skilled in woodworking, but gnomic in speech. I haven’t even touched on John Sawtelle, who started the whole enterprise with a vision but still hadn’t arrived at his raison d’etre, and his quiet, indomitable wife Mary. Wroblenski is especially good at all manner of inside dope, and I learned a great deal about many subjects, including woodcarving, but particularly dog training. (It took me until the last section to figure out the title: Canis Familiaris, which means domestic dog.) A triumph.
Cece and Charlie’s wedding in Salish, Montana, goes spectacularly awry as the norovirus strikes. But the real problem is that Cece has fallen in love with Garrett, Charlie’s old college friend who lives in town. Cece arrives early to plan the wedding at Charlie’s family’s vacation home while Charlie, a surgeon, stays behind in LA. He’d checked all the boxes to give Cece a normal, stable life, but there’s something inauthentic under his shiny surface. By contrast, Garrett is awkward and shy, but it turns out he’s her person. They marry and have a daughter. He becomes a wildlife biologist, tracking wolverines. Charlie marries Angelika, they have two kids, and that family comes to Salish periodically to vacation in the house where the wedding fiasco took place. There’s a lingering backstory between the two men involving the accidental death of a college friend, with concomitant guilt and blame. Each time the families intersect over the years, things get gnarlier between them. Climate change raises its apocalyptic head as various tragedies play out. I keep encountering that theme on the page these days and thought I’d had enough, but this one had such incredible emotional momentum that I was glued to it and ultimately very moved.
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