as someone who loved grapes of wrath and will defend avidly its place amongst the greatest of american novels, east of eden was an (amusing) disappointment.

steinbeck is, on a technical level, not the most deft of writers--he strikes with a hot and heavy hand, and at times his intentions lay too close to the surface. we witness this in wrath with clumsy foreshadowing ("i just have a feeling something is going to happen to casy!"), interspersed "rant" chapters, and the tedious descriptions of How Men Fix Cars. the difference, however, was that in grapes of wrath all this clumsiness served to tell a story that was remarkable, profound, and more than that--necessary. the story not of just of human suffering, which so many contemporary novels fixate on--of pain, of victimhood, of grievance and of oppression--but of human struggle and human survival. it faced an enormous question--how did a generation of americans survive the dust bowl?--and answered: together. it brimmed with belief--in the collective, in the resilience of (what steinbeck would never be so crass as to call) the proletariat, in the dogged and incontrovertible fact that we are each other's greatest hope for survival.

east of eden made all the same mistakes, but without anything so profound at its heart, it landed squarely in the realm of (unintentional) comedy. the undisguised self-insert kjv fanfic ("let's name the boys caleb and joseph!... no, caleb and aaron!"), #timshel (a major crux of this novel: orientals™ read the torah and discover the secrets of the universe), the beautiful teenage bride-cum-brothel-owner as the sociopathic manifestation of (possibly) human evil, the wooden conversations ("he did it because [xyz exact explanation of character's feelings]")... and all this to arrive at something like "we have free will." history is not yet ended! thank god for individualism!

i don't know, perhaps if i had read it in another life, this would have struck me as a meaningful conclusion on which to write 200,000 words, but dutiful byproduct of the american public school system that i am, a photo of a bald eagle and a link to biblestudytools.com could have sufficed

that's not to say this book isn't without its moments of beauty, of weight, of feeling. as always, steinbeck is at his loveliest when he describes the land. i was born and raised not too far from salinas, and the way he evokes the hillsides, the grass, the oaks, the scent and the soil, will never fail to strike at the most tender parts of my heart.

this book strains so obviously and desperately for greatness, and i guess i have to admire, if nothing else, steinbeck's ambition--even when it falls hopelessly short.

Salon