Sawtelle Dogs

Last
night I drove into Kansas City to see David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, speak at
Unity Temple on the Plaza. First he read a chapter called "Almondine" from the
paperback edition of his book.

Afterward, he took questions for the better
part of forty minutes.
Before
he opened up the floor, though, he detailed his theory of novels--he said, in
fact, that novels' purpose is to create a dual world for the reader, a world
where you're waking up and having coffee and going to the doctor, but, in the
meantime, you're wondering, What are the people in that novel getting up to? He
said lots of people think this is a side effect of reading novels, but, he
said, he thinks it's the main purpose of a good book.

He made it sound almost
like long, good novels are companions for us as we travel through our lives.
He
also talked about how he learned to write and craft novels--through computer
programming. He said, Not to get too artsy about it, but first drafts for him
are like making clay to sculpt later. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle took him 15 years to write.

He talked about linguistics and animal
behavior. He answered some questions about an Edgar Sawtelle movie and about the next book he's writing, but I don't want to discuss it too much because who knows how much is meant to be public information. The new book, he said, is not part of a trilogy, but the books are triptych.

He
also talked about novels as "braided objects" where themes, images,
characters--or anything, really--will emerge, travel briefly on the surface, and
submerge again. These braids appear later on and that's part of the fun.
After
the reading and the Q & A, during the signing, I asked him what novel
exemplified his ideas about the novel as a form, and he said in his MFA program
there was a group of writers who were devoted fans of a book called So
Long, See You Tomorrow, a novel by William Maxwell.

I
ordered the book today on Amazon. It seems that Maxwell, the former fiction
editor of The New Yorker, was praised
by John Updike as "one of the wisest and kindest [voices] in American fiction."
You can learn a lot more about Maxwell (and read some of his writing) by clicking
over to NPR's website.