The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt by Tristan Egolf
James Crossley

Tristan Egolf. Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt. Grove, 1999. 410 pp. $24.00.

A number of reviews have praised this book as an epic of Middle American life. That’s an exaggeration, but not an inappropriate one. Barnyard is really a contemporary tall tale, akin to the nineteenth-century dialect yarns of George Washington Harris or Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Their frontier is gone, but Egolf finds a similarly unsettled setting in the cheap apartments, dive bars, and low-tech factories of Baker, a town in an unspecified Midwestern state. Baker tolerates the members of its lowest social stratum as long as their poverty and tackiness are invisible, and it’s there that chicken farmer John Kaltenbrunner comes of age as many mythic heroes do, with the promise of high birth giving way to early orphaning and banishment. Cast out by the town’s establishment, he caroms between incarceration and several almost unimaginably demeaning jobs until returning to sacrifice himself in a garbage strike that shatters public order.
Egolf tars virtually all his characters as narrow-minded or worse, but aligns himself with the people rather than the power. He occasionally troubles to delineate personalities beyond the social roles and manages to evoke sympathy for his grotesques, although they are not allowed to speak for themselves. Institutionalized thinking rather than innate human depravity is the true target, as evidenced by civic reaction to the strike. Mounting piles of garbage summon hordes of vermin, and various attempts are made to control the pests. “Had anyone stopped to consider, it might have been pointed out that whole days were being invested in scavenger hysteria, while the root of the problem—the actual pile-up itself—was growing every hour.” The metaphoric equivalent of the pile-up is really our toxically pollutive economy; and although this issue is prevalent, it exists only as subtext. Barnyard isn’t a polemic or a call to arms, just an artfully belligerent novel. [James Crossley]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt by Tristan Egolf James Crossley Tristan Egolf. Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt. Grove, 1999. 410 pp. $24.00. A number of reviews have praised this book as an epic of Middle American life. That’s an exaggeration, but not an inappropriate one. Barnyard is really a contemporary tall tale, akin to the nineteenth-century dialect yarns of George Washington Harris or Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Their frontier is gone, but Egolf finds a similarly unsettled setting in the cheap apartments, dive bars, and low-tech factories of Baker, a town in an unspecified Midwestern state. Baker tolerates the members of its lowest social stratum as long as their poverty and tackiness are invisible, and it’s there that chicken farmer John Kaltenbrunner comes of age as many mythic heroes do, with the promise of high birth giving way to early orphaning and banishment. Cast out by the town’s establishment, he caroms between incarceration and several almost unimaginably demeaning jobs until returning to sacrifice himself in a garbage strike that shatters public order. Egolf tars virtually all his characters as narrow-minded or worse, but aligns himself with the people rather than the power. He occasionally troubles to delineate personalities beyond the social roles and manages to evoke sympathy for his grotesques, although they are not allowed to speak for themselves. Institutionalized thinking rather than innate human depravity is the true target, as evidenced by civic reaction to the strike. Mounting piles of garbage summon hordes of vermin, and various attempts are made to control the pests. “Had anyone stopped to consider, it might have been pointed out that whole days were being invested in scavenger hysteria, while the root of the problem—the actual pile-up itself—was growing every hour.” The metaphoric equivalent of the pile-up is really our toxically pollutive economy; and although this issue is prevalent, it exists only as subtext. Barnyard isn’t a polemic or a call to arms, just an artfully belligerent novel. [James Crossley]

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