[.ca] Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming ... (ISBN 0802136729)

From Amazon.com:
Tristan Egolf's first novel is an unsparing view of life in a town where inbred Appalachia and Middle America overlap and intermingle. John Kaltenbrunner, an only child, is born on the heels of his father's death. At an unusually early age, the boy shows a flair for farming and a desire to be left alone, two things that make people pick on him in increasingly vicious ways. John's life plan is to drop out of school when he hits 16 and mind his own business. But he loses everything, alienates everyone, and through a series of increasingly outrageous mishaps winds up serving three years work-release felony time on a river barge. When he comes home to Baker, no one recognizes him: John had expected, maybe even hoped for, a little something more to herald his arrival--some burning crosses or lynch mobs on the lawn, a coven of Methodists to picket his re-entry, a banner-wielding committee from the school board, anything at all. But to his disbelief, he found the streets quiet and empty. The streets don't stay that way for long as the tale truly turns on the garbage strike organized by John and his gang of fellow misfits. As a result, Baker comes apart at the seams and all the citizenry reveal their true natures. In his singular debut, Tristan Egolf demonstrates an unschooled flair for storytelling, which earned him accolades--and even a comparison to Céline--when the novel was published in France. True, his characters are cutouts with few surprises, including dialogue (there isn't any). But there is plenty of room in these pages to admire a wild and imaginative look at a slice of life cut from the underbelly of Middle America. --Schuyler Engle

title:
this book is most commonly compared to John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize winner 'Confederacy of Dunces'. That's probably as good a comparison as one can draw. 'Lord of the Barnyard' is, in my opinion, better in every way, and that's not an easy thing to pull off. Egolf's writing style is completely original. A complete lack of true dialogue and the 1st person plural perspective are two almost unnoticeable aspects of the book that make it the most unique book you'll probably ever read. It's got a plot that'll have you on the edge of tears at times and laughing out loud at others. The main character, John Kaltenbrunner, is a classic...on par with Shadow in Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods' and Roland Deschains, of Stephen King's Dark Tower books. Without a doubt, one of the best books of the decade. Highly recommended.

Wow!:
Wow! Wow is about all I can say to give you an impact on how awsome this book is. Even the way it is presented is different from most types of fiction. The story of John Kaltenbrunner basically centers around his incredibly bad luck and his unique way of solving it. First off, the way it is written is as if someone is telling you the story. There aren't any direct quotes in the book. Second, as you read through the book, watch for certain sections and stories that are told such as John's evaluation and the "unfortunate deckhand". Third, always keep note of how blatently outrageous the story is as that is part of the entertainment factor. All in all, a great read and well worth getting a hardcover as you'll find yourself refering to it and showing friends your favorite parts. So you'll need the extra staying power with the binding.

Interesting, if overrated, debut:
Tristan Egolf, Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt (Grove, 1998) Few books published in the last decade have garnered as much attention and as many favorable reviews as tristan Egolf's epic debut novel. It has achieved endless comparisons to John Kennedy Toole and William Faulkner, made ten-best lists the world over, and been lauded as the book most overlooked by all the major literary awards. Needless to say, after all that, it's roughly the literary equivalent of the 1963 shock film The Tingler (no pun intended); with all that buildup, someone's bound to get let down. First, to address the Toole comparisons: putting Lord of the Barnyard side-by-side with the unreadable piece of dreck that is A Confederacy of Dunces is to compare a Mozart sonata to a six-year-old plinking out Chopsticks on a toy piano for the first time. Everything Toole tried to do, Egolf succeeded in doing. That said, Lord of the Barnyard confirms what I have been saying for years; even if Toole's godawful tripe had succeeded in its lamebrained effort, it still would have sucked. Lord of the Barnyard doesn't, but that's less a factor of the personages and situations therein than it is indicative of Egolf's narrative style (hence the Faulkner comparisons). The difference between Egolf and Faulkner is much more subtle, and the comparisons therein are more understandable. Where Egolf fails and Faulkner succeeded is in the subtleties of character development. Egolf falls into the same trap many modern authors do where his characters are concerned; he mistakes event + event + event + event = accurate picture of character's psychological profile, and then goes on to point out the dysfunctionality of the events in question, assuming that those events will go on to fully explain the character's adult (to use the term loosely) behavior. This sort of thing is acceptable, even to be encouraged, in genre writing, where the plot is usually far more important than the characters within it anyway (and which is what makes someone like Stephen King so refreshing). But if you're going to write capital-L literature, where characters are equal in importance to (or greater in importance than) the plot, the author needs to understand that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; character development is as much in what you don't say as in what you do. Faulkner was a master at figuring out the art of putting together the whole. Egolf has a bit more work to do in that regard. He could also take a few pages from Faulkner's abilities with spare writing; what might have barely cleared a hundred fifty pages as a Faulkner piece soars to over four hundred in Egolf's hands. And that is the book's main failing. While there are certainly a number of chuckle-inducing scenes in the book, they're tied together with seemingly endless streams of explicatory prose that exist for little reason. Egolf doesn't seem to want the reader to work for anything here, and the result is almost unbearable logorrhea. Nothing would have been lost, and much gained, by editing this manuscript down another hundred or so pages. In short, there's nothing about this novel that doesn't correspond to the majority of first-novel failings; one just expects to see them less with such a universally-lauded book. It's entirely possible that Egolf's next work will live up to the standards the press set him for this one. We'll have to wait and see. ** 1/2

Bizarre more than funny...:
I picked up this book after reading about it and friends recommending it as a great laugh.. And "Lord of the Barnyard, Killing the fatted calf and arming the aware in the cornbelt" was funny, for a long while and it did make me laugh many times.. The protagonist, John Kaltenbrunner, was born and raised in Baker, a trash city in no-where land. He has lived a life, continuous with misfortunes and tragic events from even before he was born. As a very young boy he showed extreme interest and talent in running the family farm. School was of no interest, and each hour spent there he thought of as wasted time. As a teenager still in school, his mother Madam Kaltenbrunner falls ill. John helplessly watches how the people from the Methodist church lurks around, takes care of his mother in return for piece after piece of beautiful antique furniture from the farm. I really enjoyed following the war between John and the Methodist church, with Hortense as the focal point. This is certainly not a read for people who like to identify themselves with the story's protagonist, the story is too far off for that. And with over 400 pages of John's insane world - the author outstays his welcome just a little bit.. Having said that, I really enjoyed parts of this book, but it is a bizarre more than a funny read..

A Tornado of a Book:
This first novel starts strong and full of promise and begins to come apart at about the 219 page mark before finally descending into a seemingly amphetamine fueled script treatment for the Dukes of Hazzard. Before that point there are a troll's share of delightful passages and laugh out loud moments. The book goes several pages at a time painting stunningly evocative portraits with the English language as the narrative follows the misadventures of John Kaltenbrunner from pre-birth to the very end. Having worked as a rancher, roughneck, asbestos remover and chicken slaughterer, I have shared all three shifts with every form of dire, grubby human flotsam imaginable and Egolf renders these wage-slave lifers with an accuracy that makes me feel I'm in the trenches shoveling dung and slaughtering hens again. The author has written essentially two novellas in two different voices - had he stopped after the triumphant defeat of the hero at the hands (and body) of a particularly heinous Methodist crone, he would've had a short tragicomedy worthy of high recommendation. As it is, he outstays his welcome, the plot begins to catch wheels in the bog, and I found myself resisting the urge to skim the last 40 pages. As I live 350 miles from the nearest decent bookstore, the buzz and hype surrounding this book escaped me, although it's hard to miss the gushing blurbs from some gatekeepers of literary merit like Salon and Details magazines. In any case, Egolf is no Celine. However, he is a talented writer who could benefit from a more judicious editing (both internal and employed by Grove Press.)