Familiaris
In the spring of 1919, young John Sawtelle and his wife, Mary, leave their jobs and home in Hartford, Wisconsin, to settle in the north on unkempt farmland with a worn-down house and giant barn. John can walk 63 yards on his hands and is an avid reader, thinker, and note-taker. He believes anything is possible, while Mary is as practical as she is beautiful. Joined by two school friends and three dogs, John and Mary yearn for the future that their new place and freedom will bring. One of the two Sawtelle friends is a severely wounded veteran, the other a quiet craftsman/builder of anything needed.
The nearby tiny town’s dry goods store is run by Walter and his daughter, Ida. Walter found baby Ida back in 1871 after a forest fire wiped out her town. Ida, a peculiar spirit, summons swarms of bees or lightning bolts to save Walter or Mary from harm. Working non-stop to fix house and barn, the group manages impossible tasks rather well. Mary and John raise two sons. Through it all, their main purpose becomes training young dogs for sale. Their dogs behave so well that buyers stretch across the US and over to Japan and South Africa.
This sprawling work recounts the lives of the main characters and others until the early 1960s, with asides ranging from man’s domestication of wolves, to the proper use of “lie” or “lay.” Wroblewski’s creative subplots and beautiful writing deeply explore the nature of friendship, work, love, decency, treachery, even life itself. The roughly 1000 pages might have made two or three separate novels, but readers will find something to savor from the first page to the last.
