Best-seller out of the blue
Unknown novelist hits chord with epic 'Edgar Sawtelle'
In a woeful time for book publishing, when sales are stagnant and reading for pleasure is declining, an unlikely first novel is climbing bestseller lists and causing a sensation. To the astonishment of writers, editors, and booksellers, David Wroblewski's "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" is proving that readers can still fall hard for an old-fashioned literary epic by someone they've never heard of.
Though Wroblewski lives in Colorado and the book - which took more than 10 years to complete - is set in the Midwest, several New England writers played key roles in its success. They're amazed, too, even as they admired Wroblewski's talent. "None of us have ever seen anything like this," said Richard Russo, the Maine novelist who worked with Wroblewski at an early stage. "I don't think anyone would have predicted it." Margot Livesey of Cambridge, who helped Wroblewski throughout the project, said he impressed her from the beginning. "The first time I met David, he knew where he was going," she said. "It's a testimony to his vision and stubbornness that he made a very long journey from that early vision."
Released last month, the book has soared to the top five in both
Wroblewski's 562-page novel tells of a mute boy in rural Wisconsin devastated by the death of his father. Together with his wife, the father had bred a mysterious kind of dog, especially intelligent and intuitive. The story closely parallels Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (complete with ghost and a sinister uncle), and also has echoes of "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Othello." It explores deeply the ancient kinship between people and dogs. It's about bitter grief and rage, with a desperate flight into a wilderness, and a fateful return.
As with any work of art, exactly why people respond to "Edgar Sawtelle" is a mystery. It might be its Homeric odyssey, the Shakespearean drama of a father's murder and a son's quest for revenge. It might be the evocation of a rural farm community. It might even be the ghosts and the dogs.
One thing is clear: No one is buying this book because it's similar to something else they've read recently.
In a interview in Boston during his book tour, Wroblewski, 48, talked about growing up on a 90-acre farm in Wisconsin. As with young Edgar Sawtelle, his parents owned a kennel and trained dogs. He attended a two-year campus of the University of Wisconsin, then transferred to the four-year campus at La Crosse, where he became fascinated with computer software and changed his major from theater to computer science.
Though he enjoyed software, he longed to write fiction. In the early 1990s he started a novel. His computer background had trained him to approach writing as a craft, to be studied and mastered. "I was committed to its being a learning novel," he said. "I know a lot of first novels end up in drawers. I was OK with that."
He says he got the idea for the plot early on but soon discovered that writing talent wasn't enough: He didn't know how to structure the story. "When I tried to write it, I quickly saw that I didn't understand what it takes to hold a very long story together." In 1996 he was accepted into the graduate writing program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Among his teachers there were Russo and Livesey.
Experienced teachers, Russo and Livesey gave Wroblewski technical advice and encouragement, but could see all along that he heard his own drummer. "He had never done it before, but he had an instinctive understanding of what this book would take," said Russo.
He wrote 12 drafts over a decade. In 2006 he sent the manuscript to New York literary agent Eleanor Jackson, who was attracted to it immediately. "What I saw was a big, engrossing, serious literary work that touches on the human-dog relationship," Jackson said. "I thought there was a market for that." Yet she knew it would be a challenge to sell, because it is so unusual, so she decided to call editors directly, rather than submit the manuscript with a letter.
Several editors passed, but several were interested. Jackson held an auction, and the winner was Ecco Press. Ecco's editorial director, Lee Boudreaux, came to believe strongly in the novel. "When you dive into this book, you come up hours later, and you forget the world has been going on while you're reading," she said.
Yet she also faced Jackson's problem: How to interest people in a peculiar work, a retelling of Hamlet, in Wisconsin, with dogs? First, she pitched the book at the Ecco sales meeting a year ago, likening it to Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove." In publishing, exciting the sales force is essential, because they are the ones who meet the booksellers. Then came a lucky break: Boudreaux sent a bound manuscript to Maine author Stephen King, who responded with an effusive endorsement. An excerpt: "I closed the book with that regret readers feel only after experiencing the best stories: it's over, you think, and I won't read another one this good for a long, long time."
Ecco printed unusually colorful and expensively designed advance reader's editions (with King's quote on the back) and sent them to independent booksellers. The reaction was almost immediate. "We began hearing from people right after the first of the year," said Dan Cullen, editor in chief of Indie Next, the online recommended-reading list of the American Booksellers Association. "We received more nominations for this book than for any book in some time." Indie Next made "Edgar Sawtelle" its No. 1 pick for July.
Then, another huge break: Amazon.com named "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" to its best-of-the-month list for June, featuring the jacket on its home page for two weeks before the release date, along with the King endorsement and a special introductory essay by Wroblewski, which he wrote at Amazon's request. The book has since drawn glowing reviews in USA Today, The New York Times, and The
Wroblewski is delighted yet is trying not to get caught up in the excitement. He said he still feels a bit like a student, as if being a bestselling author is another craft to master. "Of course, it's great," he said. "I would love for a lot of people to read this story. But I also wish I could step aside and be an observer. The question in my mind is, 'What can I learn?' "
Russo has an idea of what publishing can learn. "Say what you want about the dumbing-down of America," he said. "This is not a dumb book. There is so much pessimism in the industry right now. Agents are realizing that there are writers like this, and editors are learning that a book like this can work."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 