“Embrace Your Madness”

But a job was a job, so Serge peeled back the title page and started reading:

There was a point at which, after the Baker/Pottville melee had wound down with the last twenty or thirty handcuffed Sodderbrook poultry-plant wetbacks, Buzzard’s-Roost Hessians, Dowler Street trolls, and east-side Baker factory rats being crammed into Sheriff Tom Dippold’s departmental paddywagons …


The sentence went on for another 168 words.

Now Serge was grinning, albeit profoundly confused. What was a Buzzard’s-Roost Hessian?

The plot seemed to focus on the lavish degradation of a garbage man named John Kaltenbrunner. John, after being kicked, spat on, beaten, arrested, and literally raped by the citizenry of his town, exacts his revenge by convincing his fellow garbage men to go on strike. The town’s trash piles up, uncollected. Vultures descend, rats, coyotes, woodchucks. A strange plot, then — but not half as strange as the author’s other devices. For one thing, the book had no dialogue. Instead, it was narrated, in a distant, almost biblical style, by a nameless brethren of garbage men. Also strange was the author’s decision to make every female character either a whore or a crone. The book — it began to dawn on Serge — was “practically unlike anything in contemporary American writing,” he recalls. Serge’s initial distrust gave way to a giddy disbelief. Who was this guy, Tristan Egolf? Why hadn’t anyone noticed him before?

Serge gave the book a perfect grade of 1.0. Masterpiece. Christine was the next to read it, and she agreed: “So violent … a kind of revolution.” And then Anne-Solange Noble read it, the birdlike director of foreign rights, and she began to tremble in a way that even Christine thought was “a bit frightening,” swept up in that prose, which Anne-Solange likens to an ouragan, a hurricane, kids and wife to the storm cellar. This character, Kaltenbrunner, the forgotten garbage man scorned by the bourgeoisie — he’s “going to be given back his dignity!” says Anne-Solange. Whereas the Americans had looked at Tristan and seen a rube, an unserious kid who couldn’t be bothered to find an agent in a city dripping with agents, the French saw the exact opposite. They saw a martyr to his art. “Powerful beyond his years,” Patrick Modiano puts it. “Too mature, too powerful, too long, too extreme a book for someone so young.”

A man like that was worth fighting for. Gallimard pulled out all the stops for Tristan. The text was translated by Rémy Lambrechts, who also translated Bellow’s Ravelstein and Franzen’s The Corrections. Anne-Solange hit the phones and called everybody she knew in Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey, begging them to buy the rights to a book that even today, years later, she still can’t read out loud to visitors without clutching it to her breast.

And wouldn’t you know: After the book came out in 1998, after it racked up improbable reviews (“A work of substance, significance and originality,” wrote the Times Literary Supplement in London) and sales of about 15,000 copies, after the ink was dry on translation deals in 10 languages … well, after all that, one of the New York houses that had rejected the draft of Barnyard suddenly changed its mind.

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