“The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” is not alone, of course, in its reanimation of “Hamlet” (see Matt Haig’s recent novel “The Dead Fathers Club,” for example), but it is surely the first to populate it with so many hounds. Set chiefly in the early 1970s, near the Chequamegon National Forest in Wisconsin, the novel tells the story of the Sawtelle family, which over the generations has strived to establish, through an experimental amalgam of breeding, training and mysticism, the ne plus ultra of the companion dog. The goal is to produce free-willed, “choice making” creatures, ones that, having “learned that a certain expression on a person’s face meant that something interesting lay behind them, or in another room,” will pursue the action best for
