Billosh World

This blog is set up for my brother and me to post things that we find interesting. I think our interests are varied but hardly unique. But, they could be unique but hardly varied. It is up to you to decide.

Friday, July 01, 2005

NEPA News

Tristan Egolf is dead. I don't know what to say. If you haven't read Lord of the Barnyard that is your loss. I'm speechless believe or not.


NEPA News

posted by Josh Campbell @ 12:27 AM 

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A tragic, and familial, ending

By Alex Beam,
Boston Globe Columnist
June 30, 2005

The recent death of 33-year-old Tristan Egolf, a novelist cursed with
promise at an early age, has given rise to a literary detective story.
Obituaries published last month failed to name Egolf's birth father,
Brad Evans, a flamboyant writer, political activist, and right-wing
adventurer who shared many of his son's gifts and demons -- and who,
like his son, died by his own hand.

Egolf's brief life story reads like a fairy tale. A punk rocker turned
street busker in Paris, he struck up an acquaintance with the daughter
of Patrick Modiano, a prominent French author and screenwriter
(''Lacombe Lucien"). Modiano helped publish Egolf's first novel,
''Lord of the Barnyard," in France. Subsequently published in Britain
and the United States, ''Barnyard" received gushing reviews. Le Monde
likened Egolf to Mark Twain, J.P. Donleavy, and Cormac McCarthy. The
French daily and the Times of London both compared Egolf --
presciently, it turned out -- to John Kennedy Toole, the talented New
Orleans novelist who killed himself at age 32.

Outside his writing, Egolf achieved some renown as a political
agitator. In July 2004, Egolf and a group of friends -- the
''Smoketown Six" -- were arrested in Lancaster, Pa., for stripping
down to thong underwear and piling on top of one another during a
visit by President Bush, to protest the treatment of prisoners at the
Abu Ghraib prison. Also last year, he organized an anti-Columbus Day
rally and burned President Bush in effigy. You can hear Egolf discuss
his protests on his multimedia website, windmillsonline.us.

The trajectory of Egolf's life eerily parallels that of his birth
father, Evans, who was divorced from Egolf's mother, Paula, when
Tristan was a little boy. (Tristan was adopted by his stepfather, Gary
Egolf.) Evans was a University of Louisville football star who worked
on riverboats and at a small newspaper in Kentucky before drifting
into the ambit of William F. Buckley's National Review magazine.
Buckley's sister Patricia and her husband, L. Brent Bozell Jr., were
Tristan's godparents.

Moving further to the right in a society that was tilting leftward,
Evans became a speechwriter for right-wing politicians and a
publicist/activist for extreme-right fringe groups such as Bozell's
militantly prolife Sons of Thunder, which had declared ''a state of
war" between the Catholic Church and the US government. At the end of
his life, Evans claimed to have been engaging in paramilitary
operations in Central America, according to his father, Warren Evans,
and Amber Faith, the mother of Brad Evans's third child. All of his
children -- Tristan, Gretchen, and Siegfried -- were named after
characters from Wagner operas. ''He was very Wagnerian," says Faith,
who lived with Evans for six years.

''Brad was approached constantly by these soldier-of-fortune types --
they really freaked me out," says Faith, who ended her relationship
with Evans shortly before his death from a drug overdose in 1987. ''He
died under questionable circumstances," says his father. ''It was
called suicide."

To what extent, if any, was Tristan Egolf's swashbuckling literary and
political lifestyle influenced by his father? The two met only a few
times before Evans's death, although Tristan later developed a close
relationship with his Evans grandparents, living on a farm near them
in Indiana a few years ago. ''I had the feeling that Tristan had a
crush on Brad," says his godmother, Patricia Bozell. ''Brad was this
wonderful, Errol Flynn-like guy. Can you imagine being his son?" ''He
remembered his dad very well and rather idolized him," Warren Evans
says. ''They were a fascinating and, for a grandfather, a sometimes
heartbreaking story."

Why was Brad Evans purged from his son's obituaries? ''I'm
speculating, but I think Paula didn't want to share her grief with
us," Warren Evans says. ''I know the family has been extremely
tight-lipped about Tristan's father," says Judy Hottensen, publicity
director at Egolf's publisher, Grove/Atlantic. Reached at her home in
Lancaster, Pa., Tristan's mother, Paula, decried the interest in her
first husband and said, ''I am not going to tell you anything."

Tristan Egolf's third novel, ''Kornwolf," will be published in January.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His email address is beam@globe.com

5:58 AM  

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