→ September 29, 2009
→ By

The Edge of Sadness.

Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, is a pensive, thoughtful character study, centered on a Catholic priest named Hugh Kennedy who, while recovered from a battle with alcoholism, still has a shade of emptiness in his professional and spiritual life, brought into focus by his reconnection with a family he has known since childhood, the Carmodys.

Charlie Carmody, the family patriarch, invites Father Kennedy to his 81st birthday party, making the priest a witness to his continued psychological tormenting of his children while also bringing him back into contact with Charlie’s son John, a priest in Kennedy’s old parish; and daughter Helen. O’Connor manages to flesh out those two characters – Charlie is basically a one-note curmudgeon, but responsible for a fair bit of black comedy – while using all of his secondary characters to help unfold Kennedy’s story and lead him to realize why he isn’t fulfilled in his current life.

It’s not an overtly theological or religious novel, although of necessity we get some internal monologues from Father Kennedy, including one on the difference between rote and thoughtful prayer:

The mechanical act of falling upon one’s knees and saying The Lord’s Prayer every day is one thing and a simple thing, but to say even the first half-dozen words of that prayer with the attention they deserve is quite another and not at all so simple. I think every prayer well said is a shot through a barricade…

Father Kennedy also breaks with the conventional fictional portrayals of priests as angry drunks, molesters, or insipid ciphers. He’s well-developed and reflective, with a sharp, almost sarcastic sense of humor:

“I mean, if you cut your hand off, it hurts; it doesn’t hurt any less simply because a thousand other people may have cut their hands off before you.”
“No, but if you remember all those other hands you may be prevented from hiring a hall and giving a short talk on ‘How I Cut My Hand Off.'”

Where the novel might fail to appeal is its almost complete lack of plot. There’s a long flashback to Father Kennedy’s battle with the bottle, including his time at a rehab facility in the Southwest (where he runs into one of those aforementioned stereotyped priests, perhaps O’Connor’s way of parodying other portrayals), and one major event at the end of the book (and if you don’t see it coming, you’re not paying attention), but the novel is introspective and dwells on its main character and narrator. I found him interesting because he was written realistically and because I found his soliloquies worth reading, but it can be slow and O’Connor’s writing did occasionally drift into wordiness.

Next up: A little light nonfiction – Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 23, 2009
→ By

The Risk Pool.

My column on the 18U Team USA trials went up the other day. You can hear my hit from Mike & Mike in the Morning today and from AllNight last night. Both were recorded on the same phone but I sound quite different in each hit. Go figure.

Richard Russo was already one of my favorite novelists after I’d read just two of his books, Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool*, but The Risk Pool cemented my affinity for his writing. I’m not sure if there’s a contemporary American novelist out there who can match Russo for both creating flawed characters and showing a clear affection for them despite their flaws, written in clear, modern prose with plenty of humor.

*Apropos of nothing, I read Nobody’s Fool right before reading William Kennedy’s Legs, then read this book right after reading Kennedy’s Ironweed, with all four novels set in upstate New York. This wasn’t a plan to read novels in geographical order – it just sort of happened.

The Risk Pool is the story of the relationship between Ned Hall and his parents, the shiftless, irresponsible Sam Hall and the wife, Jenny, he abandoned – mostly – when Ned was born and Jenny’s father died. Ned spends his childhood shuffled from Jenny to Sam and back to Jenny again, through Jenny’s mental collapse (caused in no small way by Sam) and Sam’s movement in and out of jail, sobriety, and the town (Mohawk) where Ned grows up.

Although the story is told by Ned and populated by Russo’s regular crew of local wackos, the star of the show is Sam. The elder Hall comes back from World War II a changed man, living entirely in the present, abandoning his responsibilities toward his strait-laced wife and newborn son without actually skipping town or exiting their lives entirely. Russo could easily have made Sam a villain, or just written about him with derision or obvious distaste, but Russo always embraces his flawed characters, and you can see that he enjoyed crafting Sam and putting him into odd situations to see what he’d do.

Ned finds himself torn physically and emotionally between his two parents, feeling more affection toward his father than he does toward his fragile, smothering mother, while trying not to become too much like either parent. His success or failure in this endeavor isn’t revealed until the final few pages of the book, but that question – how will Ned turn out – has a strong narrative pull in a book that doesn’t offer many unresolved questions to drag you forward. The story is driven by the characters, and because the characters are interesting, that’s just about enough.

The two Russo novels I read both had plenty of humorous moments, but The Risk Pool was definitely the funniest, both in situational comedy but also in Russo’s prose. There’s an extended riff when Ned ends up with the prim wife and timid daughter of one of Mohawk’s wealthiest families where Russo’s prose style emulates Wodehouse’s for a half-dozen pages, mostly as Ned mentally mocks the older woman’s bizarre mannerisms:

She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

If The Risk Pool has a flaw, it’s Russo’s excessive use of disposable characters. In his later books, Russo uses slightly fewer side characters and integrates them more fully into the main plot, whereas The Risk Pool has more characters that Russo shunts aside when he’s done with them. I also found the relationship between Sam Hall and his on/off girlfriend Eileen – and Eileen’s son, Drew – a little unclear in the end, particularly where Sam and Eileen had stood before Sam married Jenny and went off to war. Whether this was a deliberate omission on Russo’s part or a minor plot hole he didn’t close isn’t clear (and I can’t say more without spoiling one of the book’s few mysteries).

Next up: Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Edge of Sadness. Also, for those of you who were interested in a “book club” of sorts, how about Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread? (Granted, I might have made that subtitle up.) It’s coming up in my queue, and it’s on the short side so it should be accessible to everyone. If I have a handful of takers, I’ll fix a discussion date about two weeks ahead of us.

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→ September 18, 2009
→ By

Ironweed.

Klaw links: Yesterday’s chat transcript. Yesterday’s hit on Mike & Mike in the Morning. A quick take on Pittsburgh’s 2010 rotation and on the Angels’ complaints about Wednesday’s umpiring.

William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed, which also appeared at #92 on the Modern Library 100, is the third novel in his Albany Cycle, which started with Legs and continued with Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. Ironweed tells the story of Billy Phelan’s father, who appears briefly in the second novel as a pivotal character in Billy’s background but isn’t fleshed out at all until this third novel, which is by turns poignant and farcical, with strong prose and a smart, well-used literary device to make Francis Phelan’s difficulty dealing with his past more real to the reader.

The novel, set in 1936, shows Francis as an itinerant bum with an alcohol problem, surrounded by other bums in various stages of inebriation, several of whom are racing headlong for the grave. Francis himself played for the Washington Senators, but his career was bookended by two tragedies in which he had a hand – the death of a strikebreaker before he started playing, and the accidental death of his two-week-old son after – which drove him to alcohol and to abandon his family and hometown. Now, twenty years after his son’s death, Francis has returned to Albany to try to make peace with his past:

The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his histroy, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways.

Those shades, two of many Francis sees, are people in whose deaths he played some small part, as well as some people he otherwise wronged. They only appear to Francis, but whether they are ghosts or visions or hallucinations is never explained, nor does Kennedy need to do so. Francis has to deal with them regardless of their state before he can make any attempt to reconnect with the family he left behind. The themes that develop from there are somewhat obvious, such as Francis needing to forgive himself before he can seek forgiveness from anyone else, but the way that Kennedy unfolds them was both novel and gripping in a way that most emotion-driven books are not for me.

Next up: Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool.

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→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Tales of the Jazz Age.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, with both Tender is the Night (#2) and The Great Gatsby (#17) appearing high on the Klaw 100, but before last week had only read eight of his short stories, those contained in his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of The Jazz Age contains another eleven stories, although the edition I read indicates that Fitzgerald published over 160 short stories during his short writing career, using them largely to pay the bills as his novels didn’t come into such wide esteem as they hold today until after his death.

Of the eleven stories, only four really stood out, although there isn’t a bad read in the bunch because FSF was (and remains, I suppose) such a master of prose. The most famous story, at least today, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is just as you’ve heard – the story of a man who is born at seventy years old and ages in reverse. It’s a clever gambit, and there are some little flourishes around how your apparent age affects the way people treat you (let’s just say that resonated with me), but the story itself isn’t much of a story – just a linear run through his life from 70 to 0. I did find it amusing to see that FSF received mail from loonies much as I do today, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on Tales, although the edition I read has the word “piece” spelled as “peice” throughout the crackpot’s missive.

My favorite story in the bunch – and easily the most macabre – was “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” the story of a rather strange and insanely wealthy family camped out in a never-surveyed corner of Montana. The family will go to tremendous lengths to protect the secret of their wealth and their very existence. The story works on its own as a Hitchcockian suspense tale, but the family’s anachronistic ways set them up as a strong symbol of traditional views and practices that refuse or even fight attempts to introduce modernity to their world.

The collection also includes one straight-up romance, “The Camel’s Back,” that is almost inconsequential in plot but extremely well-written and witty, and a subtle meditation on risk and safety in life choices called “Oh Russet Witch!” Nothing in the collection is unreadable, although the phrasing in “The Tarquin of Cheapside,” which Fitzgerald wrote while he was at Princeton, is a little over-the-top, and “The Lees of Happiness” is quite sad without any point beyond, hey, sometimes life sucks.

Next up: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 4, 2009
→ By

Falconer.

John Cheever’s Falconer, another book from the TIME 100*, made little sense to me as anything more than a superficial story of a man in prison until I read a little of Cheever’s biography. If you know two basic things about the author, the novel takes on significantly greater meaning: Cheever was bisexual and struggled to come to terms with this, and he was a lifelong alcoholic, which was probably tied to the first fact. After learning those details of Cheever’s life, I found more meaning Falconer as a story of self-acceptance and recovery.

*This is the 80th book I’ve read on the TIME list, and 90 seems well within reach, but I can already tell you those last five will be a bear, if I even choose to tackle them: Infinite Jest, An American Tragedy, White Noise, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Recognitions. That’s about 4700 pages across five novels, and three of them have reputations as difficult reads. Ninety-five sounds like a lovely number, don’t you think?

The main character, Farragut, is a husband and father and has more or less had a successful career despite a heroin addiction dating back to his service in World War II, where he became hooked on morphine. For reasons not explained until near the end of the book, Farragut kills his brother, after which he’s sentenced to prison. His marriage, not strong before the murder, falls apart; his dependence on methadone becomes central to his daily life; and, even though he’s “not queer,” he has an affair with a fellow inmate. Although Cheever surrounds Farragut with a cast of wackos in his cell block, the story is entirely about Farragut and his struggle to maintain – or discover – his humanity in jail.

The prison of the book and Farragut’s gradual recovery from addiction and acceptance of his own character seem to be a metaphor for Cheever’s own life, where he struggled to accept his own bisexuality and promiscuity and drowned himself in alcohol, an addiction he apparently kicked around the time he wrote Falconer. Early in his confinement, Farragut is briefly denied his daily methadone dose and ends up suffering withdrawal symptoms, after which he pens three letters, one to the governor, one to his bishop, and one to his wife; armed with the knowledge of Cheever’s troubles, I read those letters as Cheever’s own rebellion against the authority figures in his life and prevented him or pressured him to keep his sexual orientation a secret and to feel shame for it, or just his awakening to the possibilities of a life outside of the oppression of those authority figures. Farragut’s eventual acceptance of himself is neither easy nor predictable, and in some ways it’s incomplete, but that made the book seem more real by giving Farragut antiheroic qualities.

The book is short and moves along quickly between Cheever’s prose and, outside of those three letters, little introspective text. It also moved quickly for me because, once Farragut is settled in prison, Cheever devotes a lot of ink to his main character’s sex life in prison, and I found those sections a lot easier to read if I just didn’t read them at all. The man was clearly obsessed with his own peter; perhaps there’s some Freudian analysis to be made there, but having never read Freud I saw no value in those details.

Next up: I’m still a bit behind, having just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second short story collection, Tales From The Jazz Age, this morning.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 17, 2009
→ By

No Country for Old Men.

Tentatively scheduled to be on Mike & Mike at 8:42 am EDT on Monday. Latest draft blog entry is posted, with updates on the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Rangers.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men before seeing the film and knocked it off in just three days. The book is riveting, a quick-moving hard-boiled mystery along the Texas-Mexico border that starts when Llewelyn Moss comes upon the carnage at the scene of a failed drug shipment, decides to take the money he finds, and ends up hunted by the law and by an amoral hit man named Anton Chigurh. The story is interspersed with first-person passages from Sheriff Bell, who tries to make some sense of the violence and disregard for life he saw while pursuing Chigurh. It is quick and dense with action; McCarthy makes scenes like Chigurh buying medical supplies and treating himself for bullet wounds interesting and fast.

I still haven’t seen the film version, but if the movie was true to the book for the character of Chigurh, I’m surprised to see that any actor could win an Oscar for that role. Chigurh is central, and he is undeniably scary, but he is also completely one-dimensional and boring. He’s an automaton, a remorseless, reasonless killer with no personality and little action in the book beyond (sometimes inventive) murders. The reader sees Chigurh from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, but the narrator’s view is limited to Chigurh’s actions during the events of the novel, and we are left with the same confusion and lack of information as Sheriff Bell, who refers to Chigurh as a “ghost” and whose window into Chigurh is limited to the events laid out in the novel. We know Chigurh by the trail of dead, but we know nothing else of him. (One possible interpretation of Chigurh is that he is Fate or, more likely, Death, which would explain the lack of emotion and inability to change his course of action; I imagine you could write a whole thesis on that topic.) Sheriff Bell is the most interesting and complex character, but he’s not involved in the action – he’s the thoughtful, not-dead narrator who can’t figure out the hows and whys of what he witnessed – almost as if he’s God looking down on a world gone mad.

I also found McCarthy’s prose, a little unclear in the best of circumstances, to be at its most confusing in No Country, not just due to his standard aversion to punctuation but also due to the constant scene-shifting. There are two unnamed characters in offices whose roles were never clear to me, and, when one of them is killed, I wasn’t even sure which one it was.

The problems with thin characters only bothered me upon reflection – the book was a fantastic read because of the pacing and McCarthy’s tremendous and sometimes beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of material to consider after the fact that makes up for the weak characterizations. It’s not as good as Blood Meridian or The Road but still a solid read.

Next up: Back to Blandings Castle for some Heavy Weather.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 9, 2009
→ By

Charlotte’s Web.

TV on Monday: 2:40 pm EDT on ESPNEWS and 3 pm on Outside the Lines.

Between Then We Came to the End and The Magicians, I read the #13 book on the Radcliffe 100, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, which also appears at #63 on the Guardian 100. I’ve seen both the 1973 animated adaptation and the the 2006 live-action version – we own the latter on DVD and I’ve probably seen it in whole or in parts 50 times, as my daughter went through a phase where she wanted to “watch the pig” over and over again – but I don’t think I had ever read the book; if I did, it was when I was much, much younger.

The story is probably familiar to most of you – a spider and a pig form an unlikely friendship where the spider, Charlotte, comes up with an amazing plan to save the pig, Wilbur, from ending up the entree at Christmas dinner. Charlotte’s actions attract plenty of human interest, but it isn’t until her final web that she knows she’s saved Wilbur’s live, after which he has an opportunity to return the favor in some way by saving her egg sac.

What disturbed me most about the book was the discovery that the screenwriters behind the live-action movie had changed so much of the dialogue and story. In the book, the animals play a much smaller role, and there’s no horse or crows. Fern’s younger brother has more dialogue and is less of a brat, while Fern herself actually turns away from Wilbur when she develops a crush on a boy in her class – a fickle friendship that serves as a counterpoint to the friendship between Wilbur and Charlotte. When it’s clear that Charlotte’s plan has succeeded, Fern is more interested in getting more money to go on another ride with her new boy-toy. Templeton, the rat, isn’t quite so Steve Buscemi-like, with a little more personality and a little more interest in helping Charlotte. (A little, but not much.) And Wilbur is a lot less childlike in the book, with even a touch of sarcasm was wiped out in the film version.

But most of all, I was shocked by the book’s ending – Charlotte lives! How the hell could they change that?

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 7, 2009
→ By

The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 3, 2009
→ By

Then We Came to the End.

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End starts out as a modern-day Catch-22, the hell of the cubicle-farm replacing the hell of war, but two abrupt changes in direction turn it into a more serious work, resulting in an often hilarious but uneven, disjointed novel that, despite the odd construction and mood shifts, I still enjoyed and would recommend.

The story, told almost entirely in the first-person plural, revolves around a bunch of employees in the creative area of a Chicago advertising firm that is slowly dying during the end of the dot-com bubble, with the group’s ranks diminishing by one or two with each round of layoffs. Lightening workloads mean more time for gossip, pranks, and the silly office games that seem to take place in every company that looks even a little bit like this. (The best gag in the book, about an office chair, reminded me of my favorite mousepad, one I bought through a site I’ll call F’dCompany, that reads: “you can have my aeron when you pry it off my cold dead ass.”) The first half of the book is frequently hilarious and offers a great blend of realism and absurdity – nothing in the book is impossible or even improbable, but everything is dialed up to be a little funnier or a little more ridiculous. The second half of the novel becomes more serious as one of the colleagues gets a serious medical diagnosis and a couple of the laid-off workers start to get a little weirder; although Ferris starts to give the reader a clichéd ending, it turns out to be a parody of the cliché rather than what would have been a colossal letdown in the plot.

The main problem I had with the novel is that right about at the halfway point, Ferris inserted a short story about the character who gets sick written in a different voice with a completely different tone. If I had to guess, I’d wager that Ferris had originally written this short story but found no outlet for it or was unable to expand it into a novel, so he inserted it into this novel and built the character into the novel’s story and made her subplot the primary plot of the novel’s second half. It has a disconnected feel similar to that of the end of Ender’s Game, where Orson Scott Card stuck a separate short story he’d written on to the end of what was otherwise a fun if somewhat simple sci-fi adventure/coming-of-age novel. That story and its integration felt forced, and the jarring shift in narration in Ferris’ novel was similar.

The other issue with the book is that there’s no central character with whom the reader is likely to connect – even the character in the short story isn’t terribly sympathetic, and we don’t get much insight into any other characters besides her. Ferris is working with an ensemble of interesting, quirky characters who are well defined but who by and large don’t develop and spend the entire novel at arm’s length from the reader.

Despite those two issues, Then We Came to the End is a funny and quick book that still manages to hit some serious themes, especially about work-life balance and how work has become life in different ways for many people in the workforce today.

Next up: The Magicians, the upcoming novel from Friend of the dish Lev Grossman.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 20, 2009
→ By

The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is an angry, incendiary novel that blends poetic prose and sharp characterization with a severe downward-spiral plot and one-dimensional antagonists to incite a specific reaction in the reader, one of revulsion toward an economic system that, in Steinbeck’s view, was impoverishing an enormous class of Americans while enriching a lucky few. It’s a six-lister, ranking #10 on the Modern Library 100, #3 on the Radcliffe 100, and #54 on The Novel 100, and only missing from the Guardian 100. (I don’t believe any book shows up on all seven of the booklists I use, partly a function of their varying eras – such a novel would have to have been published between 1900 and 1950, in English – and partly a function of the Guardian‘s clear contrarian bent.) According to Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, it was banned and burned when first published due to its political perspective and controversial closing scene, while literary critics frowned on its preachy dialogue, thin characters, and bombastic plotting, but its reputation appears to have been rehabilitated over time, with the work now widely recognized as an American classic.

The family at the story’s center is the Joads, one of many Oklahoman families who lose their farms and head west toward the promised land of California, where jobs allegedly await these families if they can handle the trek across the southwest. The chapters alternate between those focusing on the Joads’ plight and general scene-setting chapters that provide background for the core plot and give Steinbeck a chance to wax poetically, as on the subject of Route 66:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

The Joads reach California but not entirely intact, and end up in a “government camp,” a squatter’s paradise with real buildings, clean sanitary facilities, and a fair but strong system of self-government that enforces cooperative behavior through social pressure and the rarely-used threat of ouster. The system works perfectly, and even an attempted coup by outsiders is quickly thwarted through teamwork. It is the idyllic view of communism common to much literature of the interwar era, although to be fair to Steinbeck, the camp was not a unit or system of economic production but a social safety net for the unfortunates swept aside by capitalist greed during the Depression. The Joads aren’t in the camp for very long, but the idea of a self-enforcing system like this one operating without a whiff of corruption among those in power is incredibly naive. Steinbeck’s commentary isn’t just limited to the scene-setting chapters, and one major criticism of the novel is that he puts his opinions into the dialogue, making characters sometimes seem like mouthpieces for his political views, like Uncle John’s comments on rampant consumerism:

Funny thing, I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need … Stuff settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.

Steinbeck’s prose didn’t seem bombastic to me, nor was I troubled by slightly preachy dialogue; perhaps the 70 years since the book’s publication have seen such widespread degradation in prose writing that what was overbearing in 1939 seems fresh and clever today. Most impressive to me, however, was the book’s pacing. The Joads lose their farm, travel west over sparse land, and end up in a Hardy-esque series of big and small calamities in California that leave the reader afraid to hope for anything, yet Steinbeck focuses on little details like repair work on the family’s car to keep the text moving even when the family isn’t. There’s also a clear faith in the goodness of man – at least, of poor man – encapsulated not just in the jarring final scene but in many small sacrifices made by and for the Joads earlier in the book.

I wondered on Twitter last week if Cormac McCarthy had any of this book in mind when writing The Road, a similarly what-the-hell-can-go-wrong-next story that also focuses on a parent trying to keep a family together against impossible odds. The Joads know the name of their destination on the desolate road, but don’t know what it holds; the Man doesn’t know the name of his destination, but has a similarly vague sense of what might be there to go with the strong sense that he must take the Boy there. Both books show the best and worst of humanity in horrible situations. Both authors put substantial focus on food – not just the search for the next source, but on the consumption of it. And perhaps the father and son in the barn at the end of Grapes inspired McCarthy to build a novel around a boy and his father.

I may have more to say on Grapes of Wrath, since it, like The Road, inspires so much thought after the first reading, but in the meantime, I’ve moved on to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,