Book Review: East of Eden

East of Eden: A Novel by John Steinbeck (New York: Penguin Books, 1952. 601 pp

Born in Salinas, California in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. In 1919, he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years, he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City. He published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. After a marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, California, Steinbeck continued writing novels. Popular success and financial security came with Tortilla Flat in 1935 and he became best known for his novels on the California laboring class with Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck spent the last decades of his life in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York with his third wife. Having won the Nobel Prize in 1962, he died in 1968.

Genesis 4:3-5

In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.

Without digging too deeply into the Genesis narrative, I find it interesting to reconsider the story of Cain and Abel. For a farmer, the offering of first fruits is symbolic and significant. Not only does the offering represent months of toil and cultivation, it also means forgoing the consumption of a long-awaited treausre. In many ways, I feel like Cain. His offering is a sacrifice; it could very well have been offered in pure heart. But it was not enough. I, too, have felt the sting of jealousy and the hollowness of unworthiness. In our broken and fractured state, humans have a tendency to do bad things to people. While I’m grossly exaggerating, I do feel that circumstance partly explains the difference between a Nazi and a saint.

Genesis 4:16

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

John Steinbeck

In one word, brokenness defines John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Outlining the narratives of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – settled in the Salinas Valley in Northern California during the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, East of Eden feels similar in scope to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez without the magical realism.

On one side, the Hamilton clan settled on hard land. With a will to work and a creative gifting, Samuel Hamilton – the patriarch – massages every last ounce of productivity from the land. On the other side, the Trask family lived on fertile ground. Blessed with a large inheritance, Adam Trask found no need to toil on his land.

Commenting on Adam Trask, Samuel Hamilton speaks through Steinbeck’s pen,

“Well, he moved around as if he was alive but he left no evidence. The Lord in his wisdom gave money to very curious people, perhaps because they’d starve without” (197).

Genesis 4:10

And the LORD said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.

Perhaps occupying a central seat in the pantheon of 20^th century antagonists, Cathy Ames – and as Adam’s wife, Kate Trask – is a cold, calculating, and manipulative person. 

Speaking of Kate, Steinbeck ponders,

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms; some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul” (71)?

Experienced in prostitution and murder, Kate embraces her lot as bad person. Having birthed twins on the Trask farm, Kate leaves her husband and infants. Without the loving care of Lee, the family’s Cantonese cook, Adam and his twin boys would surely have suffered an undesirable end.

Genesis 4:13

Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is greater than I can bear.”

As the final half of the book unfolds, the narrative focuses on the lives of the Trask twins, Cal and Aron. Sharing the genetic makeup with the malformed soul of their mother, the boys grow up never knowing conclusively about her. Yet through the grapevine, the boys hear hints of the family’s sordid past.

"Cain Slaying Abel" by Peter Paul Rubens

Stated differently, these final passages in East of Eden wax poetically on the topic of brokenness in human nature. As the characters interact with the world, they often grimly conclude that they are bad people no matter the outcomes. And this feeling emerges in direct correlation with Steinbeck’s understanding of the story of Cain and Abel.

He writes,

“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with crime guilt – and there is the story of mankind” (268).

As such, Steinbeck suggests that Cain’s diabolical actions are an outcome of God rejecting him. Like a child acting out when he or she is ignored, Cain murders his brother in revenge of this rejection.

For some, the direct and clear links between East of Eden and Cain and Abel will hurt the overall evaluation of the novel. I, however, feel like the shameless connection between the stories adds to the depth and gravitas of the novel. Yes, East of Eden is long and, at times, meandering. But I find the many sections of beautiful prose and the clear biblical allusions to transform a good story into a great story.

Steinbeck is a brilliant talent and East of Eden deserves every ounce of praise it has received over the last sixty years. Please read this book.

Verdict: 5 out of 5

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Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 352 pp.)

Born in Chicago, Jennifer Egan spent her formative years in San Francisco. She majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, she accepted a fellowship at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Egan has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz. Her latest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the 2011 National Book Critics Award for Fiction, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction. Egan’s non-fiction has graced the pages of New York Times Magazine winning the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award and a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn.

The Day the Music Died

1959 might soon become 1996. When Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, singer-songwriter Don McLean  pronounced that date as “the day the music died” in his popular tune, “American Pie.”

However, the day the Telecommunications Act of 1996 became law might soon become the real day the music died. The law – which deregulated media ownership – allowed Clear Channel Communications to buy the lion’s share of the nation’s radio stations.

Showcased in the scathing documentary, Before the Music Dies, Clear Channel is arguably responsible for the decline of music in the last decade. Substituting quality for quantity, Clear Channel’s business model preached non-offensiveness. Instead of spinning the best tunes from the best artists, radio focused on keeping listeners tuned in long enough to get to commercials.

For this reason, commercial appeal replaced artistry. The music needed to have enough hooks to keep the listener from switching channels. Under this business model, legendary bands like Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd would have never grown in status since their work needed time to mature in the listener’s ears.

At the core, Jennifer Egan’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, touches on the death of the music industry and the disillusionment of the book’s characters as they encounter uncertain futures.

Everyone’s Connected

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a series of connected short stories. Set mostly in New York but also California, Africa, and Italy, the book centers around music executive, Bennie Salazar.  Jumping between the current time period, the late sixties, and the near future, each chapter tells the story of a character connected in some way to Bennie.

Written in a style similar to Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, each chapter is devoted to another character in Egan’s imagined world. As the story progresses, characters develop in the periphery. While Rachman’s short stories and multiple characters orbited the newspaper where they work, Egan’s characters do not carry a central point of reference. Although Bennie Salazar seems to be the central character, not every protagonist from chapter to chapter knows him personally.

Questions of Art, Purpose, and Brokeness

Stylistically, A Visit from the Goon Squad inquires about the legitimacy of artistry. Does punk rock remain punk rock when it is commercialized? If art exists for the sake of money, does it cease to become art? Egan writes,

“When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?” (35).

Additionally, Egan suggests that the distance between success and failure or life and death is imperceptibly minute. Writing about Bennie’s long-lost and arguably more talented former band member, Egan pens,

“Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working for the city as a janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all” (71).

Moreover, Egan explores the brokenness of her characters. Those characters successful in business struggle mightily in their personal lives; the characters with stable personal lives struggle with finances. Throughout the story, the characters labor toward keeping their heads above water. Referencing a failed publicist, Egan elaborates on her attempts to make ends meet no matter the ethical consequences:

“When the first installment appeared in her bank account, Dolly’s relief was so immense that it almost obliterated the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her: Your client is a genocidal dictator. Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew; if she didn’t take this job someone else would snap it up; being a publicist is about not judging your clients – these excuses were lined up in formation, ready for deployment should that small dissident voice pluck up its courage to speak with any volume. But lately, Dolly couldn’t even hear it” (105).

PowerPoint: A Plot Device

Of course, any book review of A Visit from the Goon Squad must mention the famous PowerPoint chapter. I have heard some label this move as pure genius. Others perceive its use in questionable terms. Personally, I found it moving, unique, and a quick way to read 80 pages. Since enough ink has been spilled on this chapter, I shall only state that it is a unique and enjoyable plot device.

Where Characters Meet

While A Visit from the Goon Squad is an enjoyable read, I found Egan’s connections between characters to be slightly forced. Where a collection of stories that locates itself within a static community provides reasonable relational connections, Egan’s characters live, work, and play in separate spheres. Although some connections made sense, it felt like Egan – at certain times – inserted characters inorganically.

Nevertheless, A Visit from the Goon Squad carries dense themes and certainly requires a reread. As the music industry crumbles around us, Egan masterfully depicts characters simultaneously breaking down. Before the music dies, I recommend reading this book.