You can trace Pete Hautman’s “Answers to Dog” back to his childhood love of classics such as Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” or Jim Kjelgaard’s “Big Red.”
Golden Valley’s Pete Hautman goes to the dogs in new young adult book
Local fiction: Walks with his pups, Gaston and Baudelaire, were a great way to research the novel, which is sometimes told from a pooch’s perspective.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
October 5, 2024 at 6:54PM
“When I was a kid, the first books that really swept me away, the first fiction I completely dove into, were dog books,” said Hautman, 72, who splits his time between Golden Valley and Stockholm, Wis. with partner (and fellow novelist) Mary Logue. “I was a typical boy of the ‘60s. So, anything with a dog, a boy, a gun or a car on the front, I would read.”
Hautman commented on Facebook about “Big Red” several years ago and, afterwards, Holiday House publishers asked him to write a preface for the book’s 70th-anniversary reissue. He agreed to do it. Diving back into some of his childhood favorites, the seed of an idea — or maybe the paw of an idea — began to take shape.
“It was so interesting to me that so many authors tried to write where some or all of the action is from a dog’s point of view. I think Jack London did it well, Kjelgaard did it well, but a lot of times it doesn’t ring true,” said Hautman, the bestselling writer who won a National Book Award for “Godless” and an Edgar Award for mystery “Otherwood.” “It’s like a kid talking through a dog’s mouth a lot of the time. So, I thought, ‘How would you do that, since their reality is very different from ours?’”
He fooled around and found out with “Answers to Dog,” in which a boy named Evan meets a stray border collie, whom he instantly loves. With help from a few friends (one of whom says, “The thing about dogs is, no matter what you want, there’s a dog for you”), Evan resolves to figure out the dog’s living situation and, then, to convince his dog-averse mom that what their family needs is a pooch.
Most of the book is told from Evan’s perspective but many sections take us into the brain of the dog as he uses his sense of smell to figure out where the boy might be or his ability to jump to evade potential captors.
Hautman thinks the jobs of actors and fiction writers overlap quite a bit — he once shaved his head to “get into character” when he was writing about a skinhead. But he didn’t lie in the grass and roll around in squirrel scat to research “Answers to Dog.” He did, however, reads books about dog behavior and he trained himself to look at the world through the eyes of his toy poodle, Gaston, and mutt, Beaudelaire.
When Hautman was writing the book, he ceded control to the dogs when they went on walks — letting them pause to pee on every pole or shift everyone’s direction in pursuit of a good smell.
“They’re using their noses and ears a lot more than we are. They’re much lower to the ground, so they’re seeing a different landscape than we are and they’re seeing different colors, as well,” said Hautman. “I was thinking of it as a technical challenge at first: How would you do that perspective? And then I thought about how these books about a boy and his dog — or, more generally, a child and an animal, bonding — were so important to me as a kid. They were a doorway that led me into the wide world of literature, so I thought maybe I could be part of that.”
Hautman wrote most of the dog scenes first, a practice he says was a little intimidating. And that’s a good thing. The writer believes most of his best work — teenage love story “The Big Crunch,” for instance, or romantic comedy “What Boys Really Want” — has been the result of him putting himself in situations outside his writing comfort zone.
“Some people are able to do the same thing, over and over again, and they do it great. Lee Child writes those Jack Reacher books and each one is totally great and totally stupid. I know, because I’ve read them all,” Hautman said. “But when I’ve tried to write a series, it’s hard for me to keep going. I always want to do something different.”
The different projects he’s currently working on include a “weird” science fiction book and a mystery/family saga, but Gaston and Baudelaire, to whom he dedicated “Answers to Dog,” are never far from his thoughts. Or his feet.
“I’m sitting here in my office, talking to you and looking at my shoes, lying on their sides on the floor,” said Hautman. “Apparently, I stepped in a huge dog poop this morning. So, after we get done, that’s what I’m going to be doing: scraping all that poop off my boots.”
Answers to Dog
By: Pete Hautman.
Publisher: Candlewick, 234 pages, $18.99.
Event: 6 p.m. Tue., Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Av., St. Paul. Free.
St. Paul writer Kao Kalia Yang has won four Minnesota Book Awards and was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
