Things I Like About America
Personal Narratives
by Poe Ballantine
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts,
Portland, Oregon
221 pp. $12.95
There is a peculiar
sensibility at work in Things I Like About America, and by “peculiar”
I mean ... well, just about every practical definition of the word. Poe
Ballantine’s voice is eccentric, distinct from all others, and belonging
primarily to one person, group or kind. (Thank you, American Heritage.) The question is: Should you as a reader
lend your time and ear to this particular peculiar voice?
The answer is a
reserved but pointed “Yes.” Ballantine’s personal narratives focus on his
intermittently wayward life, on small towns, greasy spoons, temporary jobs and
broken wounded wayfarers like himself. The book is fretted with the kind of
real-life individuals one only meets while lounging around 3 A.M.
St. Louis bus depots or while living above alternately shabby and Spic-and-Span
efficiencies in America’s heartland. Even when departing for an excursion into an
expatriate enclave in Mexico, this is America with all its congenital psoriasis
and desperation, with all its goodwill and misguided animus—and it is not
always a pleasant place to visit, much less inhabit for a month or two.
Ballantine does manage to leaven the flat unraised character of this sourdough
with an occasional dash of wry and necessary humor, but his humorous perceptions
function more as comic relief than as any persistent theme. Though much of Things
I Like About America comes across as a light, apt, and conversational
travelogue of the farce we call a homeland, don’t be fooled: its core reeks of a
nearly suicidal perspiration. Most of the characters (especially the first
person Ballantine) are one exploded fantasy short of self-extinction or
inextricable catastrophe. When his bad back and neck allow, the author loves
to hunker down with fellow work-a-day fringe dwellers and cook them a meal
while watching Time perform its inevitable rapine work. His characters crowd
around in various stages of pathos, ardor or antipathy expecting a society
that has never existed and never will, but it is in the narrator’s on-the-road/off-the-road search for that perfect town that will be his (and his alone) that
we see most poignantly the futility of expectation and attachment to dreams. In
a tangible and, yes, peculiar way, Things I Like About America
reads almost like a series of Buddhist parables intended to frighten young
adepts into enlightenment.
As a writer, Ballantine’s
gifts fall clearly in the storyteller category—though his use (or more
accurately, recognition) of symbol in everyday social interaction
elevates him far above the usual confines of such a categorization. His eye for
wry detail is as developed as that of any top-drawer satirist or sardonic bon
vivant, but he chooses to employ it more subtly, letting the absurdity of
life speak for itself without excess irony or frippery. His perceptions are
uniformly cool, sharp and affecting. Like notes from a bell made brittle by too
many nights of thirty-below dew points, they peal then shatter sending echoes
and shards into the flesh of the reader’s consciousness. In Ballantine’s
world, the trip between a joyful guffaw and overwhelming hopelessness takes the
blink of a well-turned sentence. It doesn’t seem to matter what our particular
take on life is; the stories teem with such substantial realism and human
interest that we have no choice but to disregard our individual dispositions and
get on the bus for the next disappointing town, the next rainy bus stop.
My only reservation
with Ballantine’s work in Things I Like About America comes from his
occasional tendency to launch into paragraphs of simplistic subject-object and
subject-verb-object sentence structures, quite often exacerbating the problem by
a slight over-reliance on limp auxiliary verbs. While this was not a problem in
all or even most of Ballantine’s narratives, it did pop up often enough to
pull me out of the text and make me dig for the cause of the sudden plodding
rhythm. This structuring may well have been an intentional appeal to minimalist
device; if so, it didn’t work for me. The author’s work flows much better when
he works with a standard mix of simple, compound, and complex; luckily,
this is more often the case than the exception.
In the end, it is easy
to understand why this author’s work is a favorite of Sy Safransky’s
reality-centrist The Sun. (Eight of the eleven narratives were originally
published there.) In his own peculiar way, Poe Ballantine stands as both victim
and veritable witness to a barrage of very real and damaging American Dreams.
The stories are well worth the price of
admission.
–
CAW –
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