Alaska Employment Law

Picks, No Pans

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle - This is a weighty, 576-page first novel about a rural Wisconsin family named Sawtelle that raises and trains what amounts to a special breed of dogs, the Sawtelle dogs. The son, Edgar, a young man in his teens, was born mute but not deaf, a trait that makes him especially sensitive to non-verbal communication with his dogs – and make no mistake, this is a story, in part, about the dogs: Wroblewski has some chapters that are essentially told from inside the consciousness of a dog, and those are marvelously effective. But The Story of Edgar Sawtelle portentously borrows from the plot of Hamlet, and here things get a little trickier. Suffice to say that Edgar sees something, or thinks he does, and runs away with some of his dogs in tow. Edgar’s odyssey is the best part of the book. Wroblewski’s command of language describing a world that is both fantastic and believable mostly works, but in hindsight I was a little less impressed than the critics, who have been falling over themselves, raving about this book for months and months. It’s quite a good novel, it dares to try some difficult things from a literary point of view and often succeeds, and it’s been on the best-seller lists for a long time. Still, I would give it about 3-1/2 stars, not five. The ending will probably look good if Edgar Sawtelle is optioned for film, but in the book it seems a bit contrived, and perhaps too long.

David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames - Ah, a perfect book to read on Amazon’s Kindle. As noted on these pages recently, Sedaris is a humorist, not a comedian, and his live performance consists of reading aloud the mostly autobiographical essays he writes for his books. Having heard his live performance, I thought I should try his latest book. Certainly my experience was enhanced because in my mind I could hear, and see, Mr. Sedaris with his deadpan voice telling us the silly, or pathetic, or even uplifting, tale I was reading. (One of the funniest bits in Engulfed in Flames, concerning a product known as the Stadium Pal, can be found on Youtube by searching for Sedaris’s appearance on the Letterman show.) On the whole, I don’t think it makes much sense to rely completely on the written word when dealing with Mr. Sedaris. Look for his books on compact disc first if you have not seen him or heard him. He’s a funny, endearing man.

Dennis Lehane, The Given Day - For his eighth novel, the talented Mr. Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and other fine books) swings for the fences and brings us the City of Boston circa 1918-1919. His protagonists: the cruelly underpaid, stupefyingly overworked men of the Boston Police Department (in particular Danny Coughlin and his family), who must deal with the Great Influenza Epidemic, with Bolsheviks and anarchists and the jingoists who hate them, and, one day before ratification of the 18^th amendment (that’s prohibition), with the Molasses Flood, which killed 21 people in the North End and was instantly and erroneously viewed by the government as due to a terrorist attack. Among many other real figures from history, Lehane’s book gives us a young Babe Ruth, Red Sox pitcher-outfielder, in a charming opening chapter that also introduces us to Luther Lawrence, a fictive black baseball player from Ohio who kills a man and later finds his way to the NAACP in Boston. By the way, this is easily the best use of baseball in a major novel since Don DeLillo’s brilliant re-creation of the Giants-Dodgers playoff game in 1951, the Bobby Thomson home run game, in Underworld. Finally, disastrously, the police go on strike, and the City riots. A week ago I had dinner at a South Boston restaurant whose patrons would have witnessed, or joined, the mayhem in 1919 that took place on the street just outside – a sobering set of thoughts as I ate my meat loaf. I am a big fan of Mr. Lehane, and 702 pages of The Given Day were not too many for me. He’s not Faulkner, but he’s a pretty damn good writer, and this book is a treat.