Not A Blog™

After many a blue moon, I finally finished reading Kornwolf by Tristan Egolf. The book was recommended to me mostly, I believe, because it’s set in a satirical version of Lancaster and involves a satirical version of the Amish. The slightly fantastic, contemporary setting is rarely my choice of fiction. This alone did not make the book slow reading, but it contributed. My obligatory review follows.

Reviewing this book is tricky for a few reasons. One is, of course, that I don’t seek out this sort of fiction, and I don’t seek it out because I’ve read similar things and they don’t strike me in any particular way. But also, shortly after Egolf finished the book, he shot himself. A postmortem rippage is rather not a tribute. In fairness, I wasn’t intending to be too harsh.

As I said, the book is set in a faux-Lancaster county called Stepford. A running gag throughout the book are the different names Egolf invents for the places and things around Lancaster/Stepford. The entire area is called the basin (rather than the [Susquehanna] valley). Sometimes the names are insulting: Lamepeter instead of Lampeter. (Egolf himself was a member of the Smoketown Six who protested the Abu Ghraib scandal by dressing up in thongs and reenacting the infamous pyramid while President Bush was passing through town. The incident was handled by—of course—the Lampeter police. The Lamepeter police, then, are corrupt incompetents who have all manner of humiliation happen to them in the book.) Philadelphia is Philth Town, Harrisburg is Hoarceburg, and the daily Harrisburg newpaper, The Patriot, becomes The Screed. The state of Pennsylvania is Pennsyltucky (abbreviated P.y. rather than P.a., as is common), and the Amish speak Pennsyltucky Dutch.

Other names either don’t change to something demeaning (I can’t figure out if Stepford is a reference to something; Hempfield is simply Hempland), or they don’t change at all. Plenty of names in Lancaster are strange enough already: Intercourse and Blue Ball, natch.

About the book itself. Well, it’s not bad. It has it’s annoyances, but mostly it’s just not my thing. I was pleasantly surprised to find the book had no overt political overtones. I knew Egolf was the leader of the Six, and I expected the book to be slightly more vitriolic towards world events. It mostly stayed in Lancaster/Stepford, and any commentary was on the incredibly conservative nature of the area. (Something that is certainly not under debate.) Given the amount of political commentary in contemporary works today, this was welcome.

At the beginning of the novel, Egolf didn’t do himself any favors. He pulled a few wordsmithy stunts I’ll need file away as additional literary pet peeves. At first I couldn’t decide if he was showing off or very daring. After I got to the middle of the book and these stunts disappeared, I had to conclude: showing off.

Before the first chapter even begins, he’s eyeballs-deep in ellipses. This is already an email pet peeve of mine. It’s indecisive, sloppy… annoying. It should not appear in professional fiction—certainly not to the extent they’re abused here. If you’re a good enough writer to get published, I would think you’re a good enough writer to get the effects you need without resorting to sophomoric grammar tricks… but I’ve been wrong before.

The second paragraph in the book is actually a 148 word sentence. It contains two parenthetical comments, a sprinkling of italics, and two colons. This is bad writing. It’s showing off, trying to be literary, but in reality just coming across to the reader as trying much too hard. There’s no reason the sentence needs to be this long; it does nothing for the narrative; and it’s a lame stunt. I almost shut the book right then, intending to return it to Shawn with an apology and an explanation that I don’t have time for fluted hijinks of the high variety. But something compelled me to keep going, so I said to the book, if you pull that one more time, we’re done. It didn’t.

If the prose was pretentious, what about the plot? It was long. It was meandering. It really didn’t get moving until half-way through the book. The first half contained a few subplots that go nowhere and do nothing. It also suffers from “The Stand plotweave disorder”. This is something I first noticed in The Stand by Stephen King. It’s when the author starts out with a bunch of unrelated characters with the intent of having them all meet up and do something interesting. Unfortunately, there are three main problems with this:

1. The actual “plot” part of the book doesn’t really start until the characters start meeting up. Their travels and struggles are all fine, except all too often they end up not mattering in the larger context of the book. They just exist to give the characters some motivation to get off their collective butts and start doing something. Then these initial drivers are forgotten when the story starts being told.

2. It leads to failed subplots. I think Egolf could have done some really interesting things with a few of the subplots—but he didn’t. A few of them tie together at the end, but for every interesting coincidence, there was something that didn’t matter. It needed tightening.

3. It can be hard to judge how long the meeting up time should take. Books like The Stand and Kornwolf spend too much of the book just moving characters around like chess pieces—but not like moving chess pieces into position to carry out an elegant checkmate. It’s like taking the pieces out of the box and setting them up on the board before the game starts. Nobody goes to a chess game to see grandmasters position the queen in the center of the square of her color. Authors, too, need to learn when not to include backstory, and cut out all the stuff that’s not plot. Kornwolf had a lot of not-plot.

Neal Stephenson did a good job avoiding these pitfalls in Cryptonomicon. Tristan Egolf, in Kornwolf, did not.

The book does get interesting just over half way through, through. As a testament to this, it took me about six months to get to the half way point. It took me five days to finish. That’s because, like I’ve said, the first half is pretentious and yawn-inducing, whereas the second half has a story that is exciting to read.

The ending was even satisfactory. The very end was just the ominous phrase “this story will never end” in the middle of the last page of the book. That’s trite. It’s B-horror movie material, and the book demands better. I would argue that the readers are smart enough to figure this out on their own (I suspected it, for what that’s worth), but there he puts it, plain as day, and cheesy.

But the real ending was fine. It wraps up all the major threads, explains the questions raised earlier in the narrative, and generally just feels like an ending.

All in all, there’s a good story in there. It feels like a gemstone that’s been mined from the Earth, but still stuck in its substrate of granite, cloudy and asymmetrical. Unpolished. This isn’t unexpected, considering the manuscript was published posthumously. There was probably a minimum of rewriting done to it. But it does make me wish Egolf hadn’t turned the gun on himself, and lived to revise another day. The story was coming along. It’s too bad that it got stuck where it is. It’s not done yet.

There is one final, very nitpicking detail that I have to mention. Since the story is set in Lancaster/Stepford, names common to the area fill the book: Yoder, Kreider, Stumpf, and yes, Stoltzfus. For those who don’t know, my legal last name is Stoltzfus. I shorten it to Stoltz because nobody can parse that odd combination of letters, their brain shuts down, and they don’t remember it. Stoltz, on the other hand, is strong. It’s a marketing decision.

So I’m a Stoltzfus. Egolf goes around in the book referring to groups of people with this last name as “Stoltzfi”. It’s a play on Latin, of course, where words that end in -us become pluralized with -i, i.e. more than one focus are foci.

Stoltzfus is German, not Latin, obviously, so this pluralization of Stoltzfus is clearly a jokey move. If I may be so bold:

The only people who are allowed to call a collection of Stoltzfuses “Stoltzfi” are the Stoltzfi themselves. Everyone else has to use the regular anglicized plural, “Stoltzfuses”.

I think this is only fair. At Stoltzfus family reunions—I’m actually not making this up—we do call ourselves Stoltzfi sometimes. But I bristle the moment I hear some other person say it. It’s just—no. You don’t get to do it. Please stop. Thank you.

-One of the Stoltzfi