Review: Midtown Madhatter by Mateo Monda

An American living in Guadalajara, Mexico travels to New York City to attend a wedding and hang out with his Seattle childhood friends. From beginning to end, the trip is a non-stop drug and alcohol binge. Midtown Madhatter by Mateo Monda tells of a weekend in Peter Walsh’s life along with flashbacks to his relationships with his friends and wife. He’s an unhappy man, and he’s got the addictions to prove it.

Peter’s dissatisfaction with his life comes across with every cigarette he craves, every beer he gulps, and each line of cocaine he hurriedly snorts. Under the surface of each page, a gathering pathos appears, inhabiting the details of his life. From plane rides, to encounters with taxi drivers, to hurried quests for highs at the wedding in Long Island, Peter is stuck in a life he doesn’t want.

At one point near the end of the novel, Monda describes what’s happening quite succinctly, as Peter opines, “It was like I realized right then and there that I was completely disconnected from life. There wasn’t anybody or anything that made me feel complete. I was burned out at work, my marriage was falling apart, and I had become a slave to drugs and alcohol again.”

That’s the story in a nutshell. Monda gives the reader a barrage of drug use and selfishness that defines a man lost within his destructive habits. Peter could have a good life: he’s an expat living in a city with non-stop summer, he has a wife and two daughters and a work life at his coffee shops that other men would covet. Yet this lost Manhattan weekend underscores Peter’s desire to hide inside a haze of booze and marijuana smoke.

Monda’s novel both suffers and gets traction from its narrative pace. There are times the novel moves too slowly, exposing details of mundane encounters that could have either used a good edit or better insights. At other points, the barrage of smoke and booze pile up, giving the reader the full extent of Peter’s addictive character and laying bare his disconnection from the people and world around him. The main plot lines are compelling, and drive the narrative along. However, the sheer volume and detail of minor characters that Peter pulls from his past crowds out the real story – one of a man falling away from his own life.

The ending suffers from the same issue – offering a resolution that has occurred early in the novel, attempting a summation through introspection, which comes off more as repetition. As such, the sequence summarizes the overall issue with the novel: in a story of a man going nowhere, the story doesn’t really go anywhere either. That could be claimed to be the point – we, as readers, feel his directionlessness through this story about his life – but the message is not quite insightful enough to be learned again and again.

There’s a gem of a story in Midtown Madhatter, but perhaps not one for an entire novel. That said, there are many moments of grace, humor, and well-turned phrases that keeps one reading, despite the main character’s apathy.