Been a while since my last post. I've read more than one book since then, but I wanted to take the time to write about Steinbeck's "East of Eden", because our book club just finished reading it. Well, I finished it last month, but I was the last one. It's been a busy semester, ok?
In case you're not familiar with this book, the story, in short, is that of Adam Trask, and East Coast migrant who settled in the Salinas Valley in California. This is Steinbeck's home, and he even set himself in the story as a relative to a character who was Adam's friend. Adam settles there with the girl of his dreams who happens to be some kind of sociopath. They have twin boys, and then other events ensue. By the way, Mildred tells me the movie mostly deals with the sons when they're older teens, but the boys don't reach that age in the book until the last 100 pages or so.
Actually, this book is too big to really talk about properly without writing a small book about it, so I'm going to cut it down to a couple of things that really interested me. One was that in this book, more than in any other I've ever read, the author explicitly stated what he was thinking and talking about in his book. The mechanism for this was several dialogues that took place between Adam, his Chinese servant Lee, and his friend and neighbor, Samuel Hamilton. The theme of the book, in my own words, is basically that a person can choose to do good or bad. No one is predestined to be good or bad, nor are they bound to the mistakes of the past. This theme was explicitly discussed among Sam, Lee and Adam at several points.
Mildred felt that this was a rather clumsy device and she would have preferred him to use more oblique methods of making readers aware of his intentions. It didn't bother me so much, but I can see that some readers might not like his device of explicitly stating his theme, then using his story to provide examples proving the truth of it.
After some discussion, Mildred and I weren't sure that Steinbeck ever did prove his point. Just about all of his characters fell to temptation, and he demonstrated that Aron, perfect though he was, simply couldn't live knowing that he came from something so evil (Cathy). Speaking of Cathy, nobody I talked to about the book really understood her, or rather why she was the way she was. Yes, she lacked some essential human component. What it was, I'm not sure, nor why. I didn't like that so many of his characters were so sketchy, especially the women. Again, Cathy was very poorly explained for being such a bad person, but the other women, although often portrayed as very good, simply were taken for granted. Steinbeck must have felt that it was unnecessary to explain the women as either good or bad, so he spent more time on the men.
But to get back to my earlier point: Steinbeck never demonstrated the principle of timshel (thou mayest) with any of his characters. Perhaps Caleb went off to lead a stellar life after the book, but during the book all the characters made the mistakes that you'd expect them to make. I don't say that this was necessarily deliberate on the part of Steinbeck. Mildred and I think that it was actually rather unintentional, and that while he was trying to write the story to prove his point, he wrote the characters the way he truly saw people. Not without love, but with a sure knowledge of their fallibility. He expected them to disappoint, and disappoint they did. But I suppose he ended it appropriately enough anyway; when Caleb begged for his father's forgiveness, Adam merely said "timshel", meaning that Caleb could live with or without it just as well. At least, that's what I thought. Perhaps Steinbeck truly meant something different.
With a title like "East of Eden", one does expect biblical parallels. Obviously this story was a sort of modern retelling of Cain and Abel, with Caleb and Aron filling those roles, respectively. Steinbeck basically says as much throughout the book, but he doesn't make other biblical parallels as explicit. For example, the Salinas Valley must have been the Eden of this story. Adam and Cathy were, to some extent, Adam and Eve, although while Adam Trask was as ignorant as the original Adam, Cathy was the snake in the garden, not the woman tempted. The parallels aren't exact, obviously. Adam and his brother Charles might have been Cain and Abel, too, except Charles never took the opportunity to slay his brother. Of course, in Adam's role as Adam, that made his father god and if you recall Adam's father, it must be that Steinbeck wasn't a big fan of god. Or perhaps that's extrapolating too much.
In any case, I felt like one of the purposes of the story was simply to demonstrate the inherent truth of the Cain and Abel story. Not the standard interpretation one tends to get in church, that Abel was the good son who sacrificed properly, but rather that Cain was unjustly punished simply because God preferred Abel's sacrifice to his, and for no good reason. Abel was simply more lovable, but no better. Rather heretical too, so I'm wondering if any churches ever sponsored a book burning for East of Eden. All throughout, Adam was better loved than Charles simply because he was more lovable, and Aron was better loved than Caleb for the same reason. And after much discussion, Mildred and I did agree that there is some validity to this interpretation. It does indeed occur in reality, although perhaps not so often as Steinbeck might have made it appear.
Finally, I have to say that of all the Steinbeck I've read (which I admit is only a couple of other books), this is my favorite by far. I liked the writing and I liked the story. The characters weren't always believable, but even so, they were good characters. I do recommend it, although this is certainly a book you really have to put some time into. If you do though, it'll be worth it.
