The Great Gatsby Gets a Reboot: Book Review of The Midcoast by Adam White

 

The Midcoast by Adam White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you to Random House Book Club and GoodReads Giveaways for the review copy of Adam White’s The Midcoast in exchange for a fair and honest review.

In The Midcoast, Adam White tells the story of a lobsterman and his wife’s economic and social rise in a small, Maine town. The narrator is a writer who has been stymied and has found his life engulfed by his family and teaching and coaching in a high school. Investigating the lives of Ed and Steph Thatch reignites his curiosity and inquiry.

Andrew and his young family move back to the town where he grew up and discover that the young man whose father owned the Thatch Lobster Pound and with whom he used to clean out bait sheds now is an up and coming local leader. His wife is the unofficial mayor, dedicated to preserving and updating the town. While Andrew grew up as the son of an orthopedic surgeon and attended an elite high school then college, he has slid a few rungs down the economic and social ladder in his current role as a teacher.

The book is framed by the lavish party thrown by the Thatches in honor of their daughter’s lacrosse team, which is interrupted by police presence. The rest of the book is an investigation into why the police were there and how Ed and Steph had risen against all odds.

In many ways The Midcoast is similar to The Great Gatsby. Like Nick Carraway, Andrew is our first-person narrator, though detached from much of the action, and he narrates situations from what others have told him, recreating scenes and events filled out from his own imagination. Like Gatsby, Ed has risen from nothing to a high roller, giving lavish parties and seeking to appease the woman he loves. The opulent wealth of the Thatches and their public displays mimic Gatsby’s. As in The Great Gatsby, The Midcoast questions the American Dream. Even Andrew’s simultaneous admiration and revulsion of Ed is similar to Nick's feelings for Gatsby.

Further, like Nick’s inability to see himself clearly, Andrew’s personal life hovers on the periphery of the novel, though there are suggestions that his wife is not entirely happy in their marriage and he is not so fulfilled in his job or family life. Suggestions, but no acknowledgement. In Ed and Steph, Andrew sees a dedication and romance absent from his own marriage.

Would I teach this book? I can see myself teaching this book either in a class about the American Dream in conjunction with The Great Gatsby or possibly in a first novels class, as this is White’s first novel. It is quite slow to start, and I found myself feeling a bit restless in the early chapters that describe Andrew’s youth and the beginning of Steph and Ed’s origin story. I started to wonder when it was going to get juicy. I also would have appreciated a bit more self-analysis--part of what makes The Great Gatsby a great novel is Nick and Nick’s unreliable moments, made clear by the glimpses we get from his own romantic life, including him declaring himself to be honest at the beginning of the book and by the end of the book loudly claiming that he had never thought himself to be honest. Andrew does not have the same kind of fascination for me as a reader, though the jealousy and fascination Andrew has for the Thatches could have been leveraged better to create another more personal narrative thread.

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