The Grapes of Wrath

I'm stubborn about some things.  It's genetic.  I come by it honestly, get it from both sides of my family, or so I've always been told.  If people tell me and tell me that I must do a thing, I generally won't do it just for that reason.  Silly, isn't it?  Not everything people tell you to do is bad....

I am not quite sure how or why The Grapes of Wrath wound up in this category.  Somewhere along the way, it did, though.  Oh, there were people who told me that I should read it.  It's been on every "Books to Read" list I've ever been given since middle school.  My father loves Steinbeck.  Part of his growing up across various places in the west was in California, so you can understand that, sort of like Mississippi kids and reading and studying Faulkner, I guess.  My mother used it in her classes, so she obviously thinks it is good.  I've found copies of Steinbeck are here and there in my grandfather's books, so I guess he liked him, too.  Most recently, another friend of mine read it, although I sort of think it might have frustrated him at bit here and there (oh, and btw, Faustus, if you should ever happen to read this, we should talk about the book sometime).

Maybe at some point I misunderstood what it was about or I heard too many people tell me that it was a book "everybody had to read."  I don't know.  All I do know is that I never had any real interest in it until I started reading essays on it during the AP Reading this past week.  The more essays I read on it, the more intrigued I became. I realized that my natural hardheadedness and my misunderstanding were apparently keeping me from something that I might enjoy given my love of history and the bits of the plot I was picking up from the writing I was evaluating.

I finished the book I was working on, Gaiman's Anansi Boys, Tuesday afternoon, and I downloaded The Grapes of Wrath.  It pulled me in almost immediately.  I read it every chance I got.  I had my Kindle out, cramming bits of the novel in spurts during breakfasts, lunches, and dinner breaks, over hamburgers at the Hard Rock, in the few hours before I went to bed at night, in the ten minute breaks we took during the reading, and I finished it Saturday afternoon.  I think it is one of the best books I've ever read.

Every part of it compelled me.  The characters were a fantastic blend of nobility and reality.  None of them were perfect.  Steinbeck did such an exquisite job of creating people who were flawed but striving for the best they could be in situations that were unimaginable, of people who maintained their humanity when every single thing around them conspired to rip it away from them, even other people.  Not all of them were perfect.  There were times when I wanted to reach out and beat Ruthie, but that was understandable and appropriate for her age.  Same thing with Uncle John.

Best of all, though, was the way the family dynamic worked together.  There was never any sense of saccharine sweetness to it.  Even though they didn't always agree and even though things frequently fell apart, at the core of the family there was strength.  I kept comparing Steinbeck's family core with Faulkner's in As I Lay Dying.  I couldn't stop drawing parallels between the two traveling families.

And I saw so much of my grandparents, especially my Granddaddy, in that book.  The feel of it, the hardness of that life, reminded me of things that happened to him in his life.  I think I loved it even more for that.  I also know that I have relatives all over Texas and Oklahoma, but I don't know that much about that side of my family.  Were some of them at some point "tractored" off their land?  Did they have to head west?  What choices did they have to make?

Steinbeck's style of writing was also beautiful to me.  I enjoyed the way he would interrupt the narrative to give chapters that were almost cinematic to me in their description.  The chapters that described the sellers of cars, the turtle crossing the road, the life in the government camp, were lovely in the way that they sort of panned across the entire range of a topic before settling on little vignettes of it with monologues, skipping around the way a film camera might if someone were doing a documentary about it.

This book yields so much for analysis.  There are so many levels to it, the allusions, the characterizations, the themes, the symbolism....  It is rich in ways to which many other books can only hope to aspire.  I know I'm going to read more Steinbeck.  I'm taking a short break to reread Lord of the Flies, but then I'll probably do Cannery Row.  I hope I will continue to enjoy him as much with this other work as well.