Book review(s): Steinbeck

[gfish]

I just finished a Steinbeck binge, working my way through Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. I think I had read Of Mice and Men before, sometime in high school? I certainly knew the story, anyway. Still good. The dog shooting part was hard, since I experienced exactly that as a kid, waiting to hear the shot. The dog ran under the truck one day, so my dad had to deal with it. I had been in the truck when it happened, and I didn't handle it well.

East of Eden I enjoyed, but it didn't really feel finished. The biblical parallels might be more interesting to other people, but it wasn't enough for me. I liked the people and the stories of their lives, I just wanted a meatier backbone to the whole thing.

The Grapes of Wrath blew me away. I was utterly hooked from the very beginning. The socialism/anarchism/questioning of capitalism that is a steady background for the story was a pleasant surprise. Many of the points it brings up are every bit as relevant today as they were then.

I found myself so engrossed in the story that I experienced a certain amount of culture shock. After one day of listening to several hours as I drove down to Tacoma and back, I walked into a grocery store and felt disoriented by the amount of food available. The contrast was just too great.

It helps that I have some personal ties. My dad's family were Okies, oil field workers who moved to California just a few years later than the book. I never knew them, but from all the family stories, they sounded much like the Joads. I even managed to inherit a minor linguistic quirk from them: I pronounce and hear "pen" and "pin" as the same word. /I/ and /e/, before a nasal consonant, are non-contrastive for me. If I focus, I can certainly hear the difference, but it's like hearing the difference between a short and long vowel in Japanese. Turns out that is an Oklahoma thing, and my dad does the same thing.

I grabbed a copy of the movie, because I was curious how it could have been adapted, and I was pleasantly surprised. It was very faithful, in a respectful kind of way, and I really liked Henry Fonda as Tom. It kept a lot more of the socialism than I expected, and stuck the ending pretty well, given that there was no way they could have kept the original ending.

He definitely gets added to my list of authors I'll read more of in the future, as I happen to find their works on sale.

Comments

[gfish]

I'm so mad when I think about how classics were shoved down our throats. It took me YEARS to get over that resentment, and I've always been a dedicated reader! It's shocking that anyone escapes the system with any desire to learn at all. What are teens going to get from The Great Gatsby, a story about accepting your limitations as you move into middle age? Good grief.

[tylik]

I have the fondest of memories of The Great Gatsby, but only because I got stuck over lunch with a class of kids from Lakeside (when my dad thought that maybe I should be sent there*) who were all whining and complaining because they couldn't see what was the point.

A bunch of Lakeside kids.

Oh, it was glorious.

* allegedly because Northwest was too expensive.

[ivy]

Yeah, I can't decide whether or not it's better to read mostly things about people your age (I used to like those misunderstood-teenager-is-the-chosen-one-and-saves-everything-despite-the-unfairness-of-life books, now I want to read other stories) or whether it's better to read a variety of experiences. I thought I'd think differently of "Anna Karenina" at 40 than I did at 15, and, no, I have pretty much the same opinion. "Ulysses" is a poem about not giving up despite being old, and I've loved it since I was a teenager. I wouldn't want to have missed those experiences, and yet the window does shift as we move.

[randomdreams]

Yeah, the people assigning the books, and determining the canon, are people making middle-age judgements. I remember exceptions, like Hinton's The Outsiders. There is a Harold Bloom argument that even people who don't get it should have to read it anyway so they have the same mental furniture as everyone else, and I see a lot of value to shared experience, but good classics are wasted on kids.