Review: The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes

McClelland, Ted. The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008.

In The Third Coast, Chicago-based writer Ted McClelland embarks on a three-month circle tour of the Great Lakes in search of a common regional culture.

I’ve been wanting to read a book like this since I came across Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean in a bookstore in Glastonbury. Facing the Ocean posits that (archaeologically, at least) the people of the Atlantic coasts of Europe , from Ireland to Iberia, are more like each other than like their own inland countrymen. I suspected the same might be true for the people of the Great Lakes (I personally feel more in common with Buffalo and Detroit than with the rest of Ohio).

I won’t attempt to analyze McClelland’s entire book, but rather the three chapters where the Great Lakes meets the Rust Belt: Chapter 21, The Irony of Buffalo (including Buffalo and Erie, PA); Chapter 22, Ethnic Jazz (Cleveland); and Chapter 23, Black Bottom Blues (Detroit).

The Rust Belt subculture of the Great Lakes culture is summed up perfectly by McClelland’s companion on a boat trip down the Buffalo River, past the decaying remnants of long-forgotten industry:

“There’s few things that Buffalo has done perfectly. [But it has] perfectly separated the citizens from the waterfront.”

Evidence for the Emergence of Rust Belt Fiction

Rust Belt fiction is ready to emerge as a genre. Here are two pieces of evidence that recently caught my eye. First:

“How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America” (The Atlantic, March 2010)

As I read this article, I kept thinking about how closely it described the overall mood in The Keepers of Truth. Particularly the conflict between jobless men and their wives, and the idea that women fare better in a lousy economy than men. The Rust Belt has long been flailing in the economic mire that the rest of the country is just now sinking into, so it’s possible that this Rust Belt-ization of America will act as a catalyst for the emergence of Rust Belt fiction as a genre, or that American literary fiction in general will start to resemble what Michael Collins was writing in 2001.

There’s also what Burgh Diaspora‘s Jim Russell calls a “Rust Belt Chic” in the air — a rough, offbeat quirkiness that perseveres despite the joblessness, poverty, and despair. He cites Anthony Bourdain, who last year shot a series of No Reservations episodes in the Rust Belt:

I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will “attract business”, always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a “normal” city — or a “perfect” or “safe” one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philarmonic.

This Rust Belt appeal that Bourdain describes is, however, not something I’ve found much evidence of in the literary world. It’s a niche that is begging to be filled.