“Just East of Nowhere” by Scot Lehigh; Islandport Press, Yarmouth, Maine, 2023; 256 pages, paperback, $18.95.
As Scot Lehigh’s new novel “Just East of Nowhere” opens, young Dan Winters is returning to his hometown of Eastport, Maine, to attend his mother’s funeral.
When a town cop warns Dan to watch his step, it becomes clear that Dan left town under a cloud. There’s something he has to live down. And deeper, he’s tortured by questions about why he never knew his father and how his mother as a young woman came to move from Lubec to Eastport, where she raised Dan by herself.
As it turns out, the answers to these questions are complicated. They become not less, but more complicated as Dan slowly gets to the bottom of his parents’ story. Along the way we learn that story is linked to the incident that caused Dan’s exile from Eastport.
The incident involved Dan’s Shead High classmate Griffin Kimball, who, in tandem with his improbable fishing-family buddy Sonny Beal, stumbled into a showdown with Dan and his latent anger. After the incident and its fallout, Griffin takes up with Dan’s former girlfriend, Susan, and the teen-love triangle provides a focus for disclosing the innocent, naive and sometimes dangerous mistakes made by teenagers everywhere.
In small towns like Eastport, if you’re not a star athlete, life can seem unpromising at best, and hopeless at worst, for self-aware teenagers. “Just East of Nowhere” is a story about the feelings of futility, disaffection, cultural alienation and sort of existential angst in such circumstances. “Why can’t rural people be as sophisticated as city people?” Susan asks, deep in the story. “Self-selection, maybe,” Griffin replies, his off-the-cuff tone belying the rawness, and often brutality, that characterize some of the story’s critical moments.
Scot Lehigh tells the story on the firsthand experience of having grown up in Eastport and made his way into the wider world to study at Colby College and the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and later succeeding as a journalist, working at the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix and the Times Record in Brunswick. He currently lives in Cape Elizabeth and Boston.
“Just East of Nowhere” is available through local and online book sellers.
Off Radar takes note of books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.
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