Review: Mr. Neutron by Joe Ponepinto

Reviewed by Cynthia Waldman

Mr. Neutron
A satire by Joe Ponepinto
7.13 Books, March 2018
$15.99; 285 pp.
ISBN-13 978-0998409245

In Mr. Neutron, Joe Ponepinto concocts a bubbling brew of atomic particles, political intrigue, and a character who may not be human. With a tightly woven storyline, well-drawn settings, and a reluctant hero, what results is a funny yet poignant satirical novel that is a refreshing take on our tragicomic political times.

Ponepinto’s protagonist, Gray Davenport, is neither positively nor negatively charged. He is a neutron, a fraction of an atom living in a universe of despair as gray as his name ever since his wife L’aura added the apostrophe to hers, took up art à la Jackson Pollack, and limited sex to once per season. They reside in the city of Grand River, a polluted backwater near the Pacific Coast, that mirrors Gray’s defeated psyche. A variety of foul flotsam and jetsam laps against the boats in the Marina, a stench wafts across the city from the landfill, and its citizens, embroiled in a contentious mayoral race, are losing hope.

Our hero is an apprentice political consultant for a candidate who is more interested in snack food than platform. Gray has worthwhile ideas, but his boss, Patsy Flatley, ignores him as she bounces from scene to scene on her big red exercise ball. Patsy wants to limit the campaign’s focus to crime and taxes, but only in ways that cannot be misspelled, misquoted, or misinterpreted. After seven unsuccessful years, Gray has worked the entire political morass into a single formula: E=mc2, “where E stands for the electorate, m for mass stupidity and c for the craziness of politics.”

Most readers will relate to Gray’s frustration with politics, and many with his brand of failure. Gray is the person hiding in the corner of the room behind the potted foliage, the man who occasionally builds up the courage to venture out and knock on the door of opportunity, only to have it slam in his face. Gray “had long entertained the idea that so-called reality was an illusion. He secretly hoped for the truth of it. How else to explain his failures and rejections, the illogic of effort unrewarded, of odds that never evened out?” In the thick of mass stupidity and political craziness squared, Gray is a character the reader cares about. Besides, we all know someone like Gray, or perhaps we ourselves are he.

Enter the proton, Breeze Wellington, whose powerful sexual energy nearly destroys Gray. He has long suspected that the possibility of sex is the foundation for every male endeavor, even the more ridiculous pursuits, like professional skateboarding, cheese rolling, and NASCAR, and that these activities have at their core the sentiment, “Look at me. I’m a man. A stupid man maybe, but I’m willing to make a fool of myself if it will entice you.” Although Mr. Neutron may have benefitted from fewer lust-filled scenes swirling around Breeze, there is a point to it all—a growing awareness in Gray of his less than intelligent relationship with women, and a recognition of the sexual abuse of power by certain male politicians, timely in the days of #MeToo.

As the femme fatale of the novel, Breeze puts Gray in the crosshairs of the minority candidate’s backers, white men of the old guard, Zinger and Fox, who use their riches to plunder Grand River from behind the gates of the entropic Island Retreat. Ponepinto uses setting skillfully throughout the novel whether it be the Marina, a mysterious mansion, Gray’s old apartment, or his new digs in the seedy Star Motel. Setting illustrates the old guard’s dying gasps at Island Retreat: “One of the marble tiles at the base of the stairs had chipped. A panel of wainscoting hinted its readiness to dislodge from the wall. With every visit to Island Retreat’s private yacht club, Gray saw more clearly how decayed the place was becoming.”

Reminiscent of Vonnegut’s brand of satire and his weird science (think Cat’s Cradle and ice-nine), Ponepinto’s storyline feels at least as surreal as the new reality Americans wake up to each day, though we haven’t had a candidate quite like Reason Wilder. Reason’s speeches consist of platitudes and he has no real platform, yet he is “the black hole into which everything is drawn,” attracting thousands of supporters from all walks of life. At eight feet tall, Reason is the real threat to the other campaigns. Gray crashes a rally to get a closer look.

When Reason spoke, his words seemed not in sync with his lips, like a movie off its soundtrack. He appeared even taller up close, with shoulders like a linebacker in pads. Gray looked higher, into the bleached teeth, into the twin wind tunnels of his nose, into the yellow eyes that scanned the room —independently, it seemed. A sharp, chemical mixture of smells wafted from the candidate. And the skin: to the touch it felt dehydrated, lacking the natural oils of living epidermis, as brittle as parchment, like the pages of an old book. Gray saw it now—a dead man walking. A dead man somehow charged back to life.

Like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, Ponepinto has created a monster, only his is Reason, a being who has been stitched together from dead souls of all political persuasions, a conglomerate candidate who campaigns with the slogan: “Together we will do great things for this city.” Perhaps Ponepinto has concocted the perfect politician, someone who can work across the aisle. But in the wrong hand, the Reverend Inchoate Hand in this case, Reason could become a powerful political weapon. Since Gray is a neutron, he may be the only one immune to Reason’s pull. After his dismal life takes a turn for the worse, he sets out on a quest to discover just who or what is Reason Wilder. The answer ignites a chain reaction that will alter the course of Grand River.

Mr. Neutron is peppered with laugh-out-loud sentences and descriptions that are vivid and often hilarious, as in Gray’s musings on a cube of cheese:

Now there was a name. It bubbled with testosterone and reeked of sweat. Monterey Jack, he of the three-day stubble and flower-wilting breath, the meanest, toughest hombre who ever stalked the Sierra Nevada in search of silver, women and whiskey.  A man with a name like that ate raw horseflesh; he cleaned his toenails with a Bowie knife. He feared no man, no challenge; needed no sidekick to help him through. Monterey Jack was a name a man could wear like a bandanna […].

At the beginning of the novel, Gray wonders if there is a higher calling for neutrons, “even if they appeared to be little more than ballast for the universe.” His task is to deduce their greater purpose. In the end, with the help of a chunk of Monterey Jack and a lot of Reason, that’s just what he does. A unique and entertaining satire, Mr. Neutron offers hope to uncharged particles everywhere.

Cynthia Waldman holds an MFA in creative writing from The Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. She is an essayist and author of the middle grade novel The Butterfly Basket. She and her husband divide their time between an art studio in Los Angeles and their home in a high desert canyon where they live with their white German Shepherd, a feline rodent patrol, and assorted wildlife, large and small.