BOOK REVIEW: Things I Like About AmericaBy Poe Ballantine, Old Street, £7.99
Poe Ballantine has spent three decades roaming the US, with occasional forays into Mexico. This, though, is not an account of Wild West America, the awesome glass and steel of New York or the pristine beauty of the Rockies. This is raw end of the American deal: $30 motel rooms and towns that sprawl towards the freeway; days spent scraping together enough money to pay the rent and the bar tab; nights spent tapping out his 16th rejected novel while his neighbours fire up another crack pipe.
Ballantine is a travel addict, wandering from town to town and barely staying for more than a few months at a time. His incurable rootlessness seems completely without design, and he picks towns on a whim, based, it seems, purely on the tawdry lure of their names: Fond du Lac disappoints, Waterloo is a washout, but Decorah delivers. It’s not long, however, before Ballantine is again riding the bus to nowhere.
What saves this collection from total despair is its humour and a crafted turn of phrase or captured image. A junkie neighbour attempts to intimidate Ballantine: “I told myself that even though the death penalty might be useful in some cases, no benefit would ever come from punishing the dead.” He describes a dental technician he knows, with “two kids and sad blue eyes and loneliness like a well in the ground with the splashing sound thirty seconds after you drop the rock”.
This is a travel book, but the destinations are utterly undesirable, a journey to the cold, indifferent heart of a lonesome country. The writing is beautiful in places, and the everymen and -women of these bar-room tales and mouldy-hotel laments have more than a ring of familiarity about them.