Book Review: The Midcoast

I like most of the books I read. I was excited about The Midcoast, a novel by Adam White so prominently displayed on the shelves at my local Barnes and Noble. But despite the national bestseller status and gushing reviews, the book just isn’t very good.

So what? Not every book’s going to be on my top ten list. But this one got to me for some reason, and I felt compelled to understand why.

Is it because as an author of independently published books, I wondered how this mediocre work made its way into the traditional publishing world when mine have not? Sure, that’s part of it.

But other answers are found in the very themes White explored in The Midcoast. How does one rise in class and status in America? What does it take to go from a blue-collar Maine town to the elite schools of the wealthy? Why do people want to leap classes in the first place?

Perhaps the answer to that last question is that you might get your not-so-good book onto the best seller lists.

As for my dislike of the book, at first it was the fragment sentences that caught my eye. Fragments can work, but I reread a few and thought I would never write a sentence like that.

Then came the jumps from present to past to future. I like when stories bounce around time, but it cannot be without technique. White’s temporal shifts came without hints or warnings and were more confusing than clever.

The author writes in the first person until suddenly I’m reading verbatim conversations for which the narrator isn’t present. There’s no true right or wrong in writing - authors can change perspectives as they wish - but it’s done at the risk of breaking the flow of the narrative.

White’s mix of first and third person was choppy and the result of an eleven-year struggle writing draft after draft. I’m not sure how an editor or early reader didn’t tell White his perspective switches weren’t working. My wife early reads my work and would have skewered me for writing like White.

There were three pages devoted to a character getting coffee that did nothing to advance the plot or characters. I asked myself, what am I reading right now? There was a mundane scene of a college party with so much banal dialogue, I yelled out loud, who cares!?

In the last chapter, there were pointless detours about 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing. Then White provides background detail about the town’s Pumpkin Festival. This is supposed to be the climax of the book! I want emotion! I want action! Other than a boat speeding down a river in the fog, I didn’t get it.

I realize not every sentence in a book is going to be gold, but I expected much more from a so-called best seller.

This brings me to my point. In the novel, the main character, Ed, is so desperate to provide for his wife he turns to a life of thievery and drug dealing. Only through the dirty money can his family become influential in town and their daughter can attend Amherst College with the upper class.

White attended boarding school and has degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia. He’s in The Club and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I just wonder if White’s crossover from coastal Maine lobster town to these wealthy schools provided the connections that greased the skids to make his so-so book successful.

Is the result of White’s connections the same thing Ed was chasing when he stole diamonds and transported heroin?

The Midcoast is White’s first novel. As is the case with most debut stories, the work says a lot about the author. For this reader, White’s story is uneven and boring. The most interesting lesson was in the very nature of the book itself.