Review of East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Originally published on Goodreads on December 12th, 2022
★★★★☆
Edit 2 days later… I don’t think I liked how the ending went and it’s completely soured my impression of the story. Which is a shame bc I enjoyed reading so much of it! Still worth reading and the ending I’ve been told was cathartic for other friends who read it, so maybe it’s just me. -1 star sadly.
I don’t think I’ve quite enjoyed reading anything as much as I’ve enjoyed reading this over the last month. It was a book I found quite hard to rush through, I had to take it in bit by bit. It’s comforting, inspiring, and thoughtful. Some might find it a bit pedantic, but I think that is understandable. From background reading, I get the sense that Steinbeck perhaps not wanted only to pass on his memories of the Salinas Valley to his children but also his impressions of the world through that environment and a way to break free from that.
I don’t think Steinbeck knows how to write dialogue, which is maybe funny to say, but true nonetheless. What characters say are always stilted, certain, and colorful, in this and all his other works. Some, Sam and Lee, are much more guilty of this than others. The thing is, his characters shine through nonetheless, though they feel less like real people interacting with each other than sketches of people interacting vaguely with other sketches. I’m not sure it totally matters though, because the characters serve as parable figures more than anything – the story and moral comes before all else. Indeed, the family saga mold is a boon for Steinbeck’s style as much of my attachment for the characters comes from knowing their history rather than their personality.
Ultimately, this was a brilliant read, an endlessly quotable book telling a universal – though I must take issue with Steinbeck calling it *the universal* – story. I read some of the negative reviews for this and there’s one criticism that I can’t quite stand, which is that East of Eden is Steinbeck giving one long moralizing sermon. This isn’t quite true to me – in Steinbeck’s words I hear a cry of pain, of the difficult struggle to take command of your life, to avoid temptation of justifying and blaming your own sins on your history, your environment, and the people around you. The manifestly good in his story do not get their happy endings and make plenty of mistakes – it is the struggle that is worth anything, the means not the end.