Spring 2004
God Clobbers Us All
Poe Ballantine
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts
Portland, OR
191 pp. $15.95
Poe Ballantine's
debut novel, God Clobbers Us All, bears many of the strengths of his
earlier short story collection, Things I like About America: rounded
human characters; subtle yet interesting plot points; and stimulating, evocative
situations and posits, both on emotional and philosophical levels.
Unfortunately, it also carries some of the usual weaknesses of the dreaded first
first-person novel: weak or excessive adverb use; strings of unnecessary
adjectives making for crammed sentences; muscular (occasionally bordering on
ridiculous) metaphor. In the introductory chapters of God Clobbers,
both the first person narrator and the time frame cry out to be established with
a firmer hand (though both do become clear eventually through ongoing
interaction and dialogue). These are the typical errors of fresh, idealistic
excess, of a writer intoxicated with the possibilities of language. (I'm
practically the poster child for this type of excess so I know whereof I speak.)
Though I can't say
for sure that such is the case, I would guess that Ballantine started work on an
earlier version of this novel many years prior to his work on the stories that
make up his story collection—the difference in sentence structure is marked.
However, despite the
excesses of writerly youth, God Clobbers Us All manages to pull through
and succeed on the strength of its characterization and Ballantine's
appreciation for the true-life denizens of the Lemon Acres rest home. The gritty
daily details of occupants of a home for the dying have a stark vibrancy that
cannot help but grab one's attention, and the off-hours drug, surf, and screw
obsessions of the young narrator, Edgar Donahoe, and his coworkers have a
genuine sheen that captivates almost as effectively. Donahoe does come off as
precocious and is given to bouts of punning and other bad, wacky humor (he IS
eighteen), but this is counterbalanced for the most part by a deeper wit and
Ballantine's talent for deft and veritable dialogue. The other characters also
irritate now and then with their broader-than-broad broadsides and wisecracks.
Truthfully, much of this humor would have you in stitches were you to
hear it in casual company, but in the context of a warm, raw, and ruminative
tale of an eighteen-year-old coming of age as an orderly in an elder care
facility, it comes off as glib banter that should have been scaled back a few
notches.
Late in the book,
the young narrator admits “I am a screw-up but I care about people. I number
this, along with making wild crap up, as one of my few great gifts.” This is a
fair appraisal of Ballantine's strength as a writer. His portraits, while
accurate and genuine, are generous, showing an appreciation for souls stuck in
the most menial occupations and the most desperate positions. While God
Clobbers Us All does show the occasional eruptive lesion of youth, by and
large it works well enough for us to recommend it. However, we're much more
interested in a future Ballantine work that will leave behind the relative
shallowness of youth and steer towards deeper
waters.
