Best begin with the fairy tale. Once upon a cold winter afternoon, a 23-year-old American was busking on the Pont des Arts. Seeing the blue of his ankles, a young passerby invited him to a café. "What are you doing in Paris?" she asked. "Writing a novel." "Oh really. My dad is a novelist. I'll show it to him, if you want." Her father, Patrick Modiano, liked what he read, and showed the unfinished manuscript to his publisher, Gallimard, who bought world rights. The young man was Tristan Egolf, and five years later his first novel, "Lord of the Barnyard," already published across Europe, is finally coming out in the States. It is a dark, comic tale about nasty, brutish lives in a no-horse coal town in the Appalachians. The apocalyptic but tightly structured plot involves a "scraggly, disoriented barn elf," the goat-boy John Kaltenbrunner, and the events that lead to his starting a major riot and blowing the town's thin veneer of normalcy skyhigh. As the subtitle "killing the fatted calf and arming the aware in the corn belt" suggests, the novel is written in a strange, overblown language that takes some getting used to. But the effort is worth it; this is a serious novel that revels in the squalor and madness that is America, while holding up its many hypocrisies to exuberant ridicule. In the Barnyard world, flag burning, blasphemy and God forbid homosexuality are heinous crimes, while wife-beating and incest are just part of the backdrop. Egolf is now back in his hometown in Pennsylvania, getting ready for the long-awaited US launch. Speaking on the phone, he explained that he came to Paris after researching the novel, because he needed perspective. "I had to get away from the madness which is my subject matter, and let the subject matter become even more mad with the distance. Get even more twisted and overblown and exaggerated. There is no better place to write about Kentucky and to make an incredibly over-the-top black comedy about it than the 8th arrondissement in Paris." With short stays in Amsterdam and London, he spent the best part of four years in Paris, working on the first draft in a studio by the Madeleine. "It was pretty amazing to be writing about these redneck coaltown bar brawls and then walk outside and go and get a coffee right in the middle of the business district." The other reason Egolf came to Paris was to escape the drudgery of selling beer and sandwiches in a corner store in Philadelphia. The numbing effect of manual labor is a big theme in the novel. The scenes in the town abattoir, where John joins the local Mexicans "ankle deep in blood and faeces for nine hours a day," killing and disemboweling turkeys by the thousands are not easy to forget. During his research period in the Appalachians, Egolf didn't actually work in an abattoir ("I got turned down; failed the drug test!"). But he did slave in a diaper production plant and a place that "pumped out everything from little screws to pinecone Santas to baby Jesuses on a cross to velvet Elvises and polkadogs. I used to lug the stuff on trucks all day long." "It just drives me crazy that so many people's lives are spent like that, doing nothing," he rails. "So it was my subject matter but it was also my inspiration, in the sense that it kicked me in the ass to get up and do something." But isn't writing hard work? "It's horrible, it's the worst! But if I am passionate about something, I will give whatever I have to it. Packing up 3,500 velvet Elvis frames, I can't do that, I'm conscious of every minute." It's very rare for a French publisher to buy an American book and then sell it back to the homeland. In a way, the novel's success in Europe excellent reviews, sales of more than 15,000 in France, rights sold in eight languages is not surprising; they love to slag off Uncle Sam. One Spanish critic even called Egolf "the moral voice of America," which both frightens and amuses him. But the big question is how Americans will receive the book. "It's got a good deal of momentum" he explains. The press kit full of quotes will guarantee reviews and an audience, which is half the battle. "What that audience does with it then, I really don't know. You never know in this country." Egolf becomes animated when it comes to that "ridiculous story from the bridge,' which features heavily in the media campaign. "It is absolutely true, they've just sensationalized the hell out of it, put Napoleon in rags with bare feet... And now they've been able to pre-package this fairy tale." So would he have found an editor anyway? "Oh yeah. I don't want to sound arrogant but I was not going to stop until it got published." Like the squalor and violence of his novel, there is something relentless about this driven young man with his shaven head and endless vocabulary of darkness and decay. But he insists that writing is not a catharsis; his demons are still with him. 'I haven't cast out anything... I'm every bit as angry as I've ever been! And I don't feel drained at all. If I'm going to empty out that reservoir, then it's probably going to take a few more books." He has always written, and cannot seem to stop. He meant to take a six-month break after finishing "Barnyard" two years ago, but it only lasted two weeks. When I talked to him he had just finished his second novel, the tale of "a half-bred refugee, an ex-violinist, dying of alcoholism in a roach motel." Tentative title: 'Half-breed's Lament." "It's about being young, broke, drunk and alive in Philadelphia. But not in a typical Generation-X sense, it's more twisted and over the top. I think they're gonna burn me for this one." " Lord of the Barnyard" is available in English (Picador, out now) and American (Grove, released mid-Mar) editions; the French title is "Le Seigneur des porcheries" (Gallimard). |
