Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt

Tristan Egolf

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.