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: The Art of the Commonplace

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry; edited by Norman Wirzba (Berkley: Counterpoint, 2002. 352 pp)

Born in rural Kentucky, Wendell Berry is a farmer, critic, and prolific author. He has published many works in novels, essays, poems, and short stories genres. Berry received his B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky before attending Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program. He obtained a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and taught English at New York University before taking a position on faculty at the University of Kentucky.  After a decade of teaching, Berry purchased a farm in the Kentucky countryside where he currently works and writes about the virtues of connecting with the land. Berry has won numerous awards including the T.S. Eliot Award, the Thomas Merton Award, and the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Urban Jungles

Living in a city, I sometimes find nature a nuisance. Snow might display beautiful characteristics as it coats a meadow, but it certainly exhibits headache-inducing qualities when it materializes during the commute. Vibrant evergreens coating a mountain convey the finest forms of art, yet no tree stands in the way of a property owner desiring a better view. Urban life is ultimately divorced from the land. A simple block-to-block walk downtown provides little to no evidence of ecology. The Art of the Commonplace decries these realities as it presents a case for an agrarian-minded society.

Berry’s collection of essays is divided into five parts: a geobiography, understanding our cultural crisis, the agrarian basis for an authentic culture, agrarian economics, and agrarian religion. In these sections, Berry makes the case for a counter-cultural understanding of society, a way of life rooted in and sustained by the land.

Critiquing the System

Central to Berry’s thesis is a scathing critique of consumerist culture and industrial business practice. Where our ancestors lived in unity with the land, we exist in tension with the land. The Art of the Commonplace contains prophetic passages where Berry takes the form of a minor prophet beating the drum of repentance in the face of giant institutions.

Along these lines, Berry writes,

“It is possible to make a little economy, such as our present one, that is so shortsighted and in which accounting is of so short a term as to give the impression that vices are necessary and practically justifiable. When we make our economy a little wheel turning in opposition to what we call ‘nature,’ then we set up competitiveness as the ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of economy; we make of it, willy-nilly, a virtue. But competitiveness, as a ruling principle and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our ‘wastes’ are toxic, and why our ‘defensive’ weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between ‘free enterprise’ and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so frequently in court and robbery on the increase? Why should we be surprised to find that medicine has become an exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference? People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that robbers outright are not guilty of fraud” (233).

In Berry’s mind, the contemporary industrial economy shoulders much of the blame regarding what is wrong with the world. Not only does capitalism create a system where efficiency requires low quality and high profits, but also it compels business leaders to act right up against the barriers of what is legal. In such instances, it is no surprise to see broken laws and broken people.

Eating Strawberries on a Cold, January Day

Moreover, the industrial economy creates a civilization incapable of sustaining itself. Berry laments,

“Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way – we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced” (85).

Forget growing a potato, I could not tell you when they are in season. As a child, I vaguely remember my mother buying blueberries in mass quantities because they were in season. Today, I am a grocery store away from an infinite resource of blueberries year-round. While I have not taken a poll of my generation, it seems that most people my age are in a similar position. The seasonal connection to the land by way of fruits and vegetables has slowly gone the way of the buffalo.  If I do not understand the seasons, how can I expect to establish a green thumb?

Ultimately, Berry argues that our industrialized economy has created a consequentialist culture focused on efficiency.  Berry asserts,

“Logically, in plenitude some things ought to be expendable. Industrial economics has always believed this: abundance justifies waste. This is one of the dominant superstitions of American history – and of the history of colonialism everywhere. Expendability is also an assumption of the world of efficiency which is why that world deals so compulsively in percentages of efficacy and safety. But this sort of logic is absolutely alien to the world of love. To the claim that a certain drug or procedure would save 99 percent of all cancer patients of that a certain pollutant would be safe for 99 percent of a population, love, unembarrassed, would respond, ‘What about the one percent?’ There is nothing rational or perhaps even defensible about this, but it is nonetheless one of the strongest strands of our religious tradition – it is probably the most essential strand – according to which a shepherd, owning a hundred sheep and having lost one, does not say, ‘I have saved 99 percent of my sheep,’ but rather, ‘I have lost one,’ and he goes and searches for the one” (154-155).

In short, reconnecting ourselves to the land both through a local economy and an agrarian-based religion reminds us of the power of pursuing the one as opposed to neglecting it by rationalizing that the 99 are enough.

Let’s Pack Our Bags, We’re Going to Eden!

While I appreciate and typically side with the critiques posed by the Art of the Commonplace, I find the conclusions to be slightly utopian in nature. In other words, Berry’s urge to reconnect with nature seems slightly akin to arguing that humanity ought to go back to a place and time before the fall, living a reconciled life in God’s Creation.

The fall, in my estimation, significantly alters humanity’s relationship with nature. Granted, industry possesses a poor track record of domination over the natural world. Nevertheless, biblically mandated stewardship does not negate the possibility of development. As with most things, the extremes on both sides of the economic argument fall into untenable positions. Business provides valuable opportunities to assist those in need; local economies connected to nature remind humanity that it is a creature and not a creator.

Even though I do not find anything inherently evil about urban life, Berry’s writing presents a counterpoint to the dominant views. As a society, we ought to remember and enjoy the natural world and humanity’s connection to it. Berry’s economic, cultural, and religious positions found in the Art of the Commonplace are wholeheartedly worthy of study. He poetically renders his positions unashamedly; his critiques remind us that business as usual will never solve all of the world’s problems. For this reason, I recommend this book.