BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Familiaris (David Wroblewski, author)
Historical fiction, early 20th century, North Wisconsin, family saga, dog breeding and training, friendship, farming, wood-craft and furniture building, Prohibition, crime, magical realism B-story.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Familiaris (David Wroblewski, author)
Familiaris by David Wroblewski is a multi-decade, tour-de-force family saga set in Northern Wisconsin from 1918 through the 1950s. It is a less than traditional type of love story. John Sawtelle and Mary Svoboda meet, fall in love and marry in 1918. Both are without significant extended family, and the key elements to the longevity of their partnership are their mutual adventurousness, aptitude for hard work, and love of dogs. Mary is an independent and insightful spirit, and John lives his life devoted to her and his dogs. Familiaris takes its name from the Latin term for canines, canis familiaris; John and Mary life’s work with them are at the heart of this novel.
Newlyweds John and Mary follow John’s intuitive decision to relocate from their small town in Hartford, Michigan to a smaller town in the north woods of Wisconsin. They purchase a farm, enlist a couple of friends for the adventure, and head off, without a specific plan in mind for their future. Theirs is a fresh slate and they believe that their destinies will find them and unfurl as intended in this new location. The move and their new home, complete with an enormous barn, require a couple of years of hard work, to make the house habitable and the barn functional. Mary directs the work, and John and their friends are the crew. So Jack, is a former lumberman who has absconded with an ice company’s horse and uses it for hauling. Elbow is a carpenter, and begins building furniture. Frank is a deeply unhappy, maimed WWI veteran who has a prosthetic arm and leg, a death wish and a morphine addiction. John works for the then-new telephone company as a lineman and switchboard operator.
The Sawtelles arrive in the north woods with their dogs. Eventually John and Mary discover that his true purpose and calling is the breeding, raising and training of dogs. They dive deep into the work, evaluating, training and placing dogs, carefully selecting or retaining prime dogs to breed, and conducting annual follow-ups to track each placed dog’s development. The couple have two sons, Egar and Claude, but they are secondary to the story.
At 979 pages (leading with that fact may have scared off too many readers), Familiaris has the space to allow the characters to grow and bloom and entwine themselves with one another, and to probe the depths of John and Mary’s love story without artifice. As a result the rhythms of their marriage–its love and disagreements and reconciliations—are unrushed and feel natural and exquisitely ordinary and human. They are a product of their times and decades ahead. John is quirky and Mary is sometimes cool (she was forced to be independent at a young age and experienced early trauma). Mary does not perform traditional homemaker roles (for example, Frank and John do the cooking), and is a true partner in the renovation of the farm and the dog breeding.
Familiaris is much more than just John and Mary’s love story. It is rich with B-stories and historical details. In the 1920s, rural farms did not have ubiquitous electricity or even reliable indoor plumbing. Phones were not yet in every home, and television was non-existent. It was a simpler and more challenging era. Homeowners insulated, painted, renovated and repaired their homes long before HGTV made it popular, and sometimes built their own furniture. Refrigeration was often managed with ice blocks and ice chests. Ingenuity and innovation was ascendant. Automobiles existed but horse-drawn wagons were still used, particularly in rural areas. Prohibition created an underground social scene with fly-by-night speakeasies in the woods rife illegally acquired or distilled booze and dancing, and bad guys operatingd in the shadows. All of these elements add grit and drama to Familiaris.
In addition to the historical details Wroblewski carefully embeds in the story, the author spins a secondary storyline imbued with magical realism. Early in the novel, we meet Walter Paine, a young man who sets out from home to find work near his sister, and is waylaid en route. He finds work on a ship, survives a major firestorm on the shores of Lake Michigan and in the aftermath of the fire discovers an orphaned child in the woods. He rescues the baby girl, deposits her at a rescue center, and returns to claim her as his own. It turns out that the child, who he names Ida, is a spirit-creature with special powers to foresee future events, and who ages slowly. Her unique abilities compel Walter to move each time the community in which he lands discovers Ida’s unique gifts and residents become suspicious and fearful of her. Walter eventually lands in the north woods of Wisconsin where he opens a general store and there meets John and Mary. This magical realism element is atypical in an otherwise classic historical novel. Ida’s gifts do add a second layer to the book’s foundation in the natural world and specifically, animal behavior. Walter and Ida’s story both stands alone and becomes central to key moments in John and Mary’s lives.
As John and Mary mature, it becomes increasingly evident that they are intimately tied to the natural world, both in the challenges they face on the farm in winter storms and scorching summer seasons and in their cycles of breeding and birthing dogs over multiple generations. They become increasingly expert and adept at deciphering and mastering the behavior of the “Sawtelle” dogs. The stories foundational dog behavior themes ring authentic; the animal behavior of dogs is imminently more understandable, predictable and manageable than that of their human counterparts. One character quips about dog behavior, “There is no bad dog behavior, just behavior.” The problem, he remarks, is bad training practices by humans.
Reading Familiaris is an undertaking, a 979 page commitment. That it is Oprah’s Book Club’s 2024 selection signals that it likely is a worthwhile one. Historical fiction and dog lovers alike will get comfortably lost in this story and wish for a sequel. Lucky for them, Familiaris is a prequel of sorts, and fans can follow it with The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Wroblewski’s 2009 bestseller and also an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
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