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.”
“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 re-issue. 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.
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