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Summary
Summary
An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height of her powers
Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night--an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland--a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits--assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.
Deb Olin Unferth's wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer's daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation.
Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.
Author Notes
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Granta , Harper's Magazine , McSweeney's , and The Paris Review .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Unferth's fresh heist caper (after her collection Wait Till You See Me Dance) features a most unusual quarry: 900,000 hens. After a disappointing search for her absent father maroons rebellious teenager Janey in rural Iowa, she takes a job as an auditor for the United Egg Producers and finds a kindred spirit in the disillusioned head auditor, Cleveland Smith, who can no longer consent to the grim conditions in which chickens are bred and slaughtered. Conceiving a madcap brand of ecoterrorism, the two women embark on a mission to liberate the birds. They recruit a wide array of conspirators, including the embittered animal inspector, Dill; a vengeful farmer's daughter, Annabelle; lovelorn egg salesman Jonathan Jarman Jr.; and Cleveland's faithful pet hen, Bwwaauk. After weeks of preparation, the gang are on the verge of realizing their fowl-focused emancipation when a botched effort causes more damage to the farm than they'd bargained for. In this outrageous piece of rural noir and pitch-perfect characterization, Unferth recalls Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang with a dose of vegan-minded quirk. This entertaining, satisfying genre turn shows off Unferth's range, and readers will be delighted by the characters' earnest crusade. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
The inspiration behind the new novel from the American writer Deb Olin Unferth lies in a sobering investigation she wrote for Harper's magazine six years ago on the US egg industry, which centred on conditions at a Michigan battery farm. The surprise is that what could have been a grave polemic in the manner of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, which lifted the lid on the Chicago meatpacking industry, instead takes the form of a screwball caper that wears its seriousness lightly. The book opens with part-Latina runaway Janey, who, after a bust-up with her mother in New York, finds herself living in Iowa with her estranged father, "a something something for the USDA at a poultry processing plant", who hooks her up with a job. It's a bore until Janey notices that her boss, a woman named Cleveland, is violating strict secrecy laws by surreptitiously filming the conditions in which hens are kept - not to mention stealing them to drop off at animal sanctuaries in the dead of night. By degrees, Janey is drawn into an improbably ambitious chicken rescue enterprise led by retired animal liberationists persuaded to take one last job - an undertaking that, as Unferth tells us from the off, will go catastrophically pear-shaped in ways we're kept guessing about for most of the book. Immersing us in the heady scenes and lingo of activist and agricultural life, Unferth trusts that we'll catch up. At times the narrative resembles a gonzo documentary voiced by those caught in the fallout of the bungled mission; at other times we stick close to the perspective of the main characters, rooting for them as they get in over their heads. We also get the perspective of a hen, or Bwwaauk, "as she was known to herself", and the overseeing narrator pops up all the while with wry parentheses to supply a bigger picture, from childhood flashbacks to doomy, proleptic visions of a climate-ravaged apocalypse. Written with vim and wit, Barn 8 is a highly enjoyable treatment of a worthwhile social issue. Part of what makes it so much fun is Unferth's relentlessly playful manipulation of the material. Turning the story round to present new angles, zooming in and out, she makes the vogue for plain present-tense narration seem austere by comparison. While she's often very funny, she sidesteps the obvious pitfall of caricaturing the ideologues she's writing about, even as she lets us laugh. Airing their emotional hangups, Unferth suggests they have complex motives without minimising the force of their beliefs. Nor does the novel proselytise -although it's enough of an eye-opener to give you pause next time you make an omelette.
Kirkus Review
In her last book, Wait Till You See Me Dance (2017), Unferth explored the separate complicated lives of an ensemble of lonely outsiders; here she brings back a similar band of misfitsonly this time, they're in cahoots. Helmed by a young woman named Janey, Unferth's narrative takes flight with a seemingly mundane turn of events. After leaving her mother and cozy Brooklyn brownstone for a new life in Southern Iowa with her deadbeat dad, Janey suffers a dose of reality and ends up stuck in a job as an auditor for the U.S. egg industry. While making her rounds through huge, "so-called cage-free" barns, she takes in the harrowing scene of hens "half-smothered and rotting alive...unable to look up and see anything but steel and conveyor belts." To further drive the horror of this home, Unferth reminds us that chickens, while generally deemed brainless fluff, are actually an incredibly intelligent species even capable of "long-lasting friendships." Incensed by the heinous conditions she witnesses, Janey joins forces with a fellow auditor to pull off "one of the greatest animal heists in history": stealing a million hens from one of the town's largest egg farms. To help them carry out their quixotic mission, they recruit a motley crew of animal activists, undercover investigators, vegan dishwashers, a farm heiress, and tattooed punks, all united by their desire to find hope in a world barreling toward extinction. Ignited by her fiery wit and distinctive voice, Unferth's novel uses one of America's most valuable and overlooked institutions as fertile ground to raise questions around the truths people are fed and the ones they turn a blind eye to. In a nation that produces about 75 billion eggs a year, she shrewdly points out that it's basically become "our patriotic duty" to eat them. While this kind of politically charged rhetoric could risk coming off as pedantic, Unferth's writing never feels patronizingmore than anything, it's galvanizing, especially these days when "activism [is] less revolution, more capitalism with a conscience." If this novel isn't a movement, it has enough heart to start one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Unferth is bird crazy (see the graphic novel, I, Parrot, 2017). Here she focuses her avian respect and affection on chickens, a bond forged during her reporting for Harper's on the egg industry's monstrous abuse of hens in towering megabarns. A daring writer of wit, imagination, and conscience, Unferth has transformed her foray into hen hell into an adroitly narrated, fast-paced, yet complexly dimensional novel about emotional and environmental devastation. The catalyst is teen Janey's abrupt departure from her happy life in Brooklyn with her single mother to meet her newly revealed father in Iowa. Marooned there, she eventually ends up working as an egg-farm auditor with her mother's former babysitter. Appalled at the brutality of the operations, they concoct an audacious (make that ludicrous) plan to liberate nearly a million tortured hens, drawing in Annabelle, a charismatic scion of a leading egg-farm family turned legendary animal activist. As this animal heist misadventure unscrolls, Unferth sharply illuminates the contrariness of human nature, celebrates the evolutionary marvels of chickens, and exposes the horrors of the egg industry. Unferth's vividly provoking and revelatory work of ecofiction spiked with mordant humor and powered by love joins the ranks of Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole (2002), Sara Gruen's Ape House (2020), Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012), and Abby Geni's The Wildlands (2018).--Donna Seaman Copyright 2020 Booklist
