You're Welcome, Jensen

[oselle]

Those of you who read my J2 fic, "Avalanche," may have noted that I gave Jensen the pivotal role of Claude Sawtelle in the film adaptation of David Wroblewski's highly acclaimed 2008 novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I did this for two reasons: one, I was reading Sawtelle while writing that story and two, it's the sort of straight dramatic role that I'd love to see Jensen take on (i.e., not part of the horror/fantasy/sci-fi genre).

Jensen would be a terrific fit for Claude -- he's a little too young to play the character now, but he'd be just the right age in a few years. Claude is the villain of the story but he's also described as being almost irresistibly charismatic, the kind of guy who's at home in any situation, among all kinds of people, just through the sheer power of his charm. It should also be noted that Claude drives an Impala, which is never referred to as "Claude's car" but always as "the Impala," which also got me thinking of Jensen.

At the time I was writing "Avalanche," I hadn't finished the novel. Now that I've finished it, I'm pretty disappointed with Claude, as I was disappointed with the whole book. My disappointment, let me show you it.

This book was a huge critical sensation when it was released, and I read it upon recommendation from my neighbor, who absolutely adored it. If you take a look at the paperback version, the first eight pages of the book consist of lengthy and hyperbolic praise, often employing words like "transcendent" and "stunning." The phrase, "the Great American Novel" even gets trotted out. Maybe it was a mistake to read those reviews because I was expecting a stunning and transcendent experience that, in my opinion, the book just didn't deliver.

For those of you who don't know it, Sawtelle is a sort of re-working of Hamlet, only instead of the royal courts of medieval Denmark, we're at a dog kennel in rural Wisconsin in the early 1970s. Edgar, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, is Hamlet. His father, Gar, is the king. His mother Trudy is Queen Gertrude; his uncle Claude is Claudius; Page Papineau, the family veterinarian, is Polonius and I believe his faithful dog Almondine is supposed to be Ophelia. If you think that couldn't possibly work, you're kind of right.

Edgar grows up with his mom and dad on an idyllic farm in northern Wisconsin. Edgar is mute from birth, but not deaf. His father, like his grandfather, raises a unique breed of dog, the "Sawtelle dog" that has been bred not for physical characteristics but personality. Sawtelle dogs are the family business and the Sawtelles are exceptionally good at it. All is well in this little corner of all-American paradise.

Into this happy scenario comes trouble with a capital "C" and that stands for Claude. Claude is the prodigal son who left the farm years ago, joined the Navy, and, it is suggested, spent some time behind bars. Claude moves into the house and it's no time at all before the lifelong tension between Claude and Gar rears its head. After a never-explained fistfight, Gar kicks Claude out of the house. Not long thereafter, Gar dies of an aneurism. Trudy and Edgar attempt to keep the kennel running but there's too much work and an exhausted Trudy eventually falls seriously ill with pneumonia. Claude is waiting in the wings to provide his assistance and a shoulder for Trudy to cry on. Pretty soon he's providing Trudy with a lot more than that, if ya know what I mean. Claude moves back to the farm and takes over the kennel. Soon, with Doc Papineau's help, he embarks upon turning the kennel into a commercial enterprise, not the dedicated and almost mystical vocation that it had been for the other Sawtelle men. Following a confrontation in the barn between Edgar and Trudy, an eavesdropping Doc Papineau dies accidentally by falling down some stairs. For no apparent reason, Trudy tells Edgar to hide in the woods and not to come back until she calls for him. Edgar decides to keep going, taking three Sawtelle dogs with him (but not Almondine, with whom he's had a falling out). Edgar stays away for a couple of months and then returns to find that Almondine has been run over and killed. Meanwhile, Claude has duped Doc Papineau's son, Glen, into thinking that Edgar may have been responsible for Doc's death. Glen is a good-natured but not-too-bright lug and his attempt to question Edgar about Doc Papineau's death goes horribly wrong. The barn catches fire, Edgar has just enough time to save the dogs before Claude murders him the same way he murdered his father, with some sort of apparently untraceable but instantly lethal poison that he found while stationed in South Korea. Then Claude dies in the fire. Not sure what happens to Trudy, but I think she goes bananas.

This book had so many elements that I love in fiction: angsty hero? Check. Charismatic villain? Check. A harrowing journey fraught with danger? Check. And yet there was some disconnect in this book because all these awesome elements somehow never achieved that magic alchemy that pushes my buttons.

Angsty hero Edgar is the first problem. I really don't know why the kid had to be mute -- it doesn't seem to add anything to his character or the story. Maybe the author wanted to show that his disability made him more attuned to Claude's true nature, less swayed by his charisma. I could somehow see this if Edgar were deaf and therefore reliant upon his eyesight alone, but he's not. Except for being unable to speak, his senses are no different than anyone else's. I do pity Edgar when his father dies and Claude sneaks his way into the family, but I just never developed a connection with the kid, at all. Reading this book, I kept thinking of Stephen King and Peter Straub's The Talisman and its young hero, Jack Sawyer (who sometimes went by the name of Sawtelle himself). I was fucking in love with that kid. Maybe I wouldn't have loved him as much if I hadn't read the book when I was a teenager myself, but I don't know...I still have such fond memories of that book and that character. I bonded with him, the way I bonded with Frodo or Dean Winchester. Edgar? It just never happens.

Claude, the charismatic villain, is another problem. The murder of Edgar's father by Claude is the catalyst of the story, as it was in Hamlet. Now, in Hamlet we get that this has to do with court intrigue and royal power struggles. There's a whole kingdom at stake there. In Sawtelle there's...a dog kennel at stake. A very unique and successful dog kennel, but it's a dog kennel. You're not exactly going to become king of anything by bumping off the guy who runs the joint. Claude starts off as a fascinating character and I read through the whole novel waiting for some great revelation about Claude and his behavior but it never came. The only thing we're left to assume is that Claude is a psychopath with a freaky taste for exotic poisons and a mystifying hatred of his brother. Although the author never really seems to agree that Claude really is a psychopath, nor does he ever give us much insight into why there was such animosity between Claude and his brother...except that maybe Gar knew Claude was bugshit crazy. As stated, charismatic villains appeal to me. However, bugshit crazy ones really don't -- especially when the author himself can't just buckle down and admit that Claude is bugshit crazy. Which he is. He has to be. I think. Maybe.

The harrowing journey fraught with danger is probably the most disappointing part of the book. Judging from the reviews, I was expecting...a harrowing journey fraught with danger. Instead we've got a boy and his dogs out camping -- in the middle of summer! -- for a couple of months. This isn't a journey it's a Boy Scout expedition. The gravest danger Edgar encounters are the north woods mosquitoes. And oh yeah, one of the dogs cuts her foot.

Along the way, Edgar meets a lonely guy named Henry Lamb who puts him up for a little while. I absolutely adore just this sort of unexpected Good Samaritan in fiction, but Henry Lamb is yet another character in this book that doesn't click for me. He seems to serve no purpose other than putting a roof over Edgar's head for a while. Later, after a tornado, Edgar has a sudden and inexplicable revelation that he has to go home. Two of the dogs that accompanied Edgar decide to stay with Henry and ease his loneliness. This scene is presented with tremendous gravitas but I have no idea why it's so important. We never see Henry again.

The book is rife with other problems. Edgar's mother, Trudy, is wholly unsympathetic, and even the chapters written from her perspective offer little insight. You just wind up amazed that she could possibly be so thick as to not understand why her son would be upset about his mother getting nailed by his uncle a mere four months after his father's sudden death. She thinks he's just being a teenager or something. Seriously, Trudy? Wroblewski also makes the mistake a lot of people do when writing women -- he thinks he's writing her as steely and determined, but she just comes across as bullheaded and self-absorbed and a little bit of an insensitive bitch.

Then there are these weird little things that seem like they're going to be important but then just...aren't. Early in the book, we keep hearing about some hippie commune led by a beautiful flowerchild named Alexandra Honeywell. Naturally, I imagined Alexandra Honeywell would play a key role in Edgar's story. She does not. She never enters into it at all. A stray dog named Forte keeps inexplicably popping in and out of the book. There's a long, dull sequence in which Henry Lamb makes Edgar earn his keep by cleaning out his messy shed. The shed is haunted by the ghost of an old man who talks to Edgar about nothing that's remotely relevant. I have no idea why this is even in the book. There's a meeting between Edgar and a seemingly psychic little girl, granddaughter of the local wise old crone. This also amounts to nothing. We're subjected to a long series of letters between Edgar's grandfather and another dog breeder, which gives us great insight into the Sawtelle Method of Training Awesome Dogs but that's about it. There's also a story about a preternaturally devoted Japanese dog that is plenty charming but also just doesn't seem to serve any purpose.

The reviews also praise the "beauty of the language," calling it "lyrical" and "luminescent" but I don't even get that. Even the scene where Edgar meets his father's ghost, which should have been luminous, felt strangely clumsy to me -- overwordy and heavy and slow in the way that fanfiction sometimes gets when the writer is trying a little too hard. Wrobelewski spends so much time describing how the raindrops resolve themselves into Gar's ghost that I was like, "OMG enough with the rain already." Overwordiness is a problem throughout the book, and Wroblewski also has a habit of needlessly throwing little comments, and sometimes entire passages, into parentheses, which is a real pet peeve of mine.

The climax of the book ("riveting!" according to the critics) also left me numb. It seemed to go on forever and, even though I didn't connect with Edgar, I was still pissed off that Wroblewski killed off a fourteen-year-old kid. There are other places where the book veers away from the Hamlet formula, so I don't know why Edgar had to die. Killing the tragic Prince of Denmark is one thing, murdering a little boy is quite another. And his death is so utterly meaningless and Claude just goes ahead and does it in what appears to be some sort of fugue state where he hardly even knows what he's doing or why. Then he dies, too. Then the dogs all run off into the woods. End of story.

The only thing in the book that really worked for me were the dogs. I thought the chapters written from the dogs' perspective would be cringeworthy but they're the best in the book, especially Almondine's. Frankly that's another thing that pissed me off. Mowing down poor old Almondine before she even got to see her beloved Edgar again. Bad author! No biscuit!

Finally, and bizarrely, the book reminded me of Supernatural. The whole Impala thing kept smacking me in the face but more than that, the book did a lot of the annoying things that SPN does. Characters behaving inexplicably. Events that seem important then amount to nothing. Women who are supposed to be impressive but are just perplexing and somewhat annoying. And me, never quite knowing what the creator is getting at.

This isn't the first time I've been left cold by a highly praised book but I've seldom been so let down by one that seemed to promise so much of what I like. Once again -- sort of how I often feel about Supernatural. Which is maybe why I kept picturing Jensen as Claude. If they make this overhyped book into an overhyped movie and cast Jensen in it, you know I'll be there, lovelorn sucker that I am. And boy, this is just the sort of overblown "great, sweeping epic" that would get Oscar nominations.

I sometimes have a good eye for casting (I called that Radcliffe kid as Harry Potter well before he was cast, damnit!) and believe me, if they make a movie of this book (which I'm sure they will) and don't even consider Jensen for Claude, they're idiots. So let me conclude this godawful long post by saying: I thought this book was totally overrated and I really didn't care for it but everyone else in the world seemed to love it and everyone will probably love the movie and Jensen Ackles should play Claude Sawtelle. Period.

You're welcome, Jensen. You're welcome.

Comments

[mews1945.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't think Edgar Sawtelle was the book so many critics adored. I couldn't put my feelings into words the way you can, but I got so bored with it that I quit reading it about fifty pages in. I don't have enough years left to spend any of my time reading a book that bores me. And I think probably the reason it bored me was that I just didn't give a damn about any of the characters. They didn't engage my feelings in any way. Even the dogs didn't win me over.

Like you, I'd love to see Jensen do a really good movie with a strong role that would show off his awesome acting talent. I just don't think Edgar Sawtelle is the story for him.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Exactly -- the characters didn't engage my feelings. I was pissed off that Edgar died at the end but if it had been a different kind of book I would have just BAWLED over Edgar's death and I didn't. But I SHOULD have bawled over Edgar's death. Frankly that whole climax was so drawn out I was kind of glad when it was over.

This would be the kind of "event" movie that could get universally panned by the same critical outlets that would suddenly be embarrassed over all that fawning praise for a very mediocre book. Or it could go the other way and attract the same fawning praise. If it were the latter, it would be a great vehicle for Jensen, great for his career anyway. At any rate, I'd rather see him in something like this than some Michael Bayesque action/adventure piece of shit.

Re: i would love to hear about some books that you adore :>

[oselle.livejournal.com]

There are too many books I adore to go into them.

I can see best-sellers being disappointing, but this wasn't just a best-seller it was a critical darling and THAT I don't get at all.

[corbyinoz.livejournal.com]

This is interesting, because every now and then there's a disconnect between a book that is wildly praised and my appreciation of it, and I often wonder if that's a cultural issue. My taste is only that, and I rarely make the mistake of thinking that if I don't get a book, it must of necessity be the book's fault. Often I'll simply shrug and say okay, this book was just not written for me. And that was my repsonse to ye Sawtelle saga.

And yet - when a book is praised ridiculously and you can find glaring flaws that transcend matters of taste, it is doubly annoying! One of the worst books I've ever read, and one of the most disappointing, was The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. Sounded brilliant, just my thing, topping NY bestseller lists... And it is so badly written! The conceit is much of it is a diary, and those [articular chapters are still written as one writes a narrative and

that is a whole different genre!

It's a mistake often made in fanfic; letters that feature ellipses, for exmaple. People *don't* write 'I don't - I can't go on. Or maybe I should ... God, I don't know!' They write, 'I fell like I should go on but I don't know how.' And Kostova's book was

riddled

with this sixth grade crap! And a good writer has 'voice' - given the multiple authors, I should have been able to tell at a glance whose diary we were reading, but no. It's exactly the same mediocre style throughout.

Ooh, sorry, your delicious rant lit a fire under me, too! But yes - bottom line, when I read a book that's been praised to the skies, I damn well expect to have something exceptional in my hands. If it's good, but it's not to my taste, fine; but if there are structural points and authorial choices that I can objectively point to and say, what the - ? Irritation is too fine a word for it.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I rarely make the mistake of thinking that if I don't get a book, it must of necessity be the book's fault.

I know exactly what you mean. I was bored to tears by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude...I mean, I literally didn't get past the hundredth page. And that thing was a Nobel Prize winner! That usually turns up on those lists of books you have to read to consider yourself a well-read person. See, that's a case where I know it's just me. The whole magical realism thing that Marquez was doing? Did nothing for me. But I could see that it wasn't the book itself.

Now, Sawtelle isn't by any means an utter piece of shit like say, Twilight. I wouldn't even say that it struck me as badly written, like your experience with The Historian. There is a good story here and it was engaging and entertaining and I did finish the book. But I kept waiting for all that great stuff the critics were talking about to happen...kept waiting and waiting, holding my breath for it, and then boom. Book's over. Where was all the great stuff? Did I miss it? I was especially irked by this book because it promised so much of the exact sort of great stuff that I love and then none of it was there. Or a little tantalizing hint of it would be there and then just fizzle out to nothing.

More than anything I was disappointed by Edgar's journey in the wild, which was described by critics as "harrowing," "riveting," and a "fight for survival," yet it was NONE of those things AT ALL. It was, like I said, a camping trip, and not a particularly interesting one. Now, for heaven's sake. Writing about harrowing journeys is one of my own favorite things and I'm just some fanfiction shmuck but even I know that a harrowing journey should be harrowing, not something that reads like an old Boy's Life story. I just don't know what these critics are talking about. I don't know what book they're writing about.

A friend of mine who's a voracious reader laughed when I mentioned I was reading Sawtelle. He called it "the greatest book ever that no one actually liked." And I think he's got a point. I know my neighbor absolutely loved it (and I don't know what the hell I'm going to tell her about it) and I'm sure other readers did too, but this book really seems to be one of those inexplicable cases of mass critical orgasm over something that, in a few years, will probably be considered pretty average.

[oxer12.livejournal.com]

I posted a (much shorter) version of this on my FB page a while back. I read Sawtelle because of the dog stuff in it, and all my trainer friends were like, "You must read this!! It has dogs!"

Well, guess what? I hated Marley & Me and I hated this book, too. I was so disappointed. The dog stuff irritated me on a trainer level, because I didn't agree with a lot of it, and I thought the story was so clunky. Also, I didn't find a single character likable.

When I posted how much I hated it, I was inundated with replies of, "Oh thank God, me too!!!" LOL

[oselle.livejournal.com]

You know, I went on Amazon today to read the customer reviews and the negative ones far outnumbered the positive. Nearly everyone hated the ending and a lot of people cited the exact same things I did, especially a lack of connection to the characters and seemingly important plot points that just wound up going nowhere. A lot of people said they felt like their time had been wasted. One guy even said he hated the book so much he couldn't wait to get it out of his house! I think this is one of those cases where the critics are just sniffing each other's glue or something. Either that or they're all fuckin terrified of Oprah Winfrey, who devoted an entire episode to fawning over this thing.

And frankly, while I liked the dog chapters, the training bits irritated me too. I was especially annoyed by a reference to "idiot dogs," i.e. every dog that is not a Sawtelle dog. My Daisy WAS NOT AN IDIOT thank you!