Sasha's Reviews > East of Eden

Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books, so I was pretty excited for this one...and I feel let down. It's not as good.

It's a sprawling story, covering three generations and two families, but focusing on wealthy farmer Adam Trask, his butler Lee, his estranged and sociopathic wife Cathy Ames, and their twin sons Caleb and Aron, who are analogs for two other literary brothers: (view spoiler)[Cain and Abel, and Steinbeck will tell you that in case you didn't get it. Which, by the way, one problem with making a reference like that is that it basically spoils itself: there's only one very important thing about the story of Cain and Abel. (hide spoiler)]* Steinbeck's own family makes an appearance, and the story is narrated by Steinbeck himself; this is a conceit that doesn't go anywhere and doesn't really work.

* I had the same problem with the TV shows Sons of Anarchy, which billed itself as "Hamlet on motorcycles" and then tried to make a mystery of who killed the protagonist's dad.

Speaking of Sons of Anarchy, there's some rough stuff in here. Steinbeck can be lurid. The fate of one character's mom is brutal: "My father clawed me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails." Holy shit, bro.

I like the sprawl of the book, and Steinbeck has no issues with storytelling: he can keep a guy turning pages as well as anyone. Cathy is the most fun, of course - the villain always is, and Cathy at one point considers murdering a guy via tapeworm, which is awesome - but all of the dozen or so stories Steinbeck juggles here are entertaining reading. The problem is that it's all pretty melodramatic and heavy-handed and sentimental. It teeters on maudlin, and in the end goes all the way over.

The main offender is Lee, the Chinese butler to Adam Trask. He talks in a way no human has ever talked, and he does a lot of it. I was constantly reminded of Harrison Ford's despairing comment on George Lucas's Star Wars script: "You can type this shit, but you sure has hell can't say it." It doesn't ring true at all. And Lee seems to be contagious, too: whenever he starts banging on, everyone else starts talking like him too. Here's an example of Lee talking:

A few are women from the moment they're born. [This one lady] has the loveliness of women, and the courage - and the strength - and the wisdom. She knows things and she accepts things. I would have bet she couldn't be small or mean or even vain except when it's pretty to be vain."

...Hmph, that didn't have the impact I was hoping for. It's more the cumulative effect, I guess - the fact that he always comes out with shit like that, like, over breakfast. He's like your over-serious friend who's always trying to make grand speeches when you just want to talk about TV.

Lee is critical to the central message of the story; in fact I think you could make the argument that he's the real protagonist. He learns Hebrew in order to re-translate the Biblical word "timshel" as "Thou mayest," rather than "thou must" or "thou will," thus bestowing free will on humanity. It's not a super deep message.

There's a good character in Lee, a second-generation Chinese who's perfectly fluent in English but hides behind pidgin because it's easier to get along when you do what people expect. And who, I think, may be closeted but in love with Adam. Lee could be compelling. But Steinbeck blows it by turning him into Obi Wan Kenobi.

And he blows this book, basically. I mean, I liked it - it's just that my expectations were very high, because Grapes of Wrath is a monster of a novel. This is just a fun book to read. It was written 13 years after Grapes - 1952 to 1939 - and without the help of his editor and first wife Carol, and I don't know if he just got old and sentimental like men do or if he needed that editor or what, but East of Eden is the work of a writer who is no longer great.