Book report: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
Is there a word for killing the poor? There's homicide and suicide and regicide and fratricide and genocide. But is there such a word as paupricide? I doubt it, because the poor aren't important enough to worry about killing. The poor exist to pick our lettuce and sweep our floors and dig our ditches and anything else we don't want to do. Who cares if they die?
This is a story about the poor tenant farmers in the 1930s who could not make the payments on the small plots of land that kept them alive in Oklahoma and other states tormented by bad weather. They were evicted, their houses plowed under by tractors. Many of them fled to California, where they were told there was plenty of work as farm laborers.
The Joad family – Tom (just paroled), Ma, Pa, Grampa, Granma, Noah, Al, Ruthie, Winfield, and Rose of Sharon (pregnant wife of Connie) – is only one among many thousands that crowded into the state, competing after too few jobs. They start out with 12 family members and one friend of the family. By the time they reach California, they have lost 6 of their number, to the snapping wolves of death, sickness, starvation, beatings, the shock of uprooting, hopelessness, confusion, and the law.
Steinbeck gives each of his characters a deep nobility. They are ordinary and unimportant, and, in his hands, that is noble. These people are nobody special, and so he creates statues of them a thousand feet tall, *because* they are nobody special. They are stupid and weak and gullible and vulnerable, and he treats them with a compassion and tenderness that I can only describe as Christ-like. Because they are imperfect. Because when we are weak, then we are strong.
Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it's easy to see why. I would give my left arm to have written any one page of this book. The writing is lyrical and beautiful, effortlessly and inconspicuously poetic. He transforms the brewing of a pot of coffee or the fixing of a truck engine into a sacrament. It is almost a single long epic poem, the Odyssey (or the Iliad?) of our land. I can imagine a member of the Swedish Academy reading this and thinking, "Yes, that's what we're looking for."
Steinbeck alternates chapters, one specifically about the Joads, the next about the country at large, the big picture. This is effective in several ways. To focus solely on the Joads would be unendurably painful. The big picture makes a welcome break, as well as the opportunity to mentally lift the head and see the forces – economic, political, psychological, religious – at work in the land at the time. There is one chapter on a turtle crossing a road that is a little gem of writing and symbolism.
The book reminds me of Steinbeck's also-magnificent "Of Mice and Men" in the way they both proceed inevitably to their inescapable ends, like the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Indeed, it's not hard to see the earlier "Of Mice and Men" as the warm-up swings before hitting this towering homer. These are Steinbeck's "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet."
It's hard to imagine how people like the Joads didn't revolt against the system, turning the suffering country into another Communist nation like Russia or China. I attribute the fact that this did not happen to Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood. People were given enough hope, and enough distraction, to turn their thoughts from that dark road. But it would not have been surprising if things had turned out very differently. The title of the novel comes from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe (quoting Revelation):
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
It suggests a righteous judgment, long suspended, bursting upon the world. You find yourself wishing that that would happen in this book, to save these people.
I know that, if the same kind of calamity ever happened to us, we would not survive as well as the Joads. We are too far from the necessities of life. We know nothing of food and work. Cut off our Internet and bank accounts and utilities and we would be dead within weeks.
Sorry if I've strayed too far into the spiritual, but the book has a spiritual undercurrent. Don't worry: the only time you read "Jesus" is as a curse, and the only religious characters are a deeply flawed preacher and a self-righteous moron for whom pleasure=sin. Still, there's more there than just the world. When Ma Joad says that she's learned that if you ever need help go to a poor person, that's a hint at this kind of faith. Something bigger than ourselves, but perhaps composed of the best parts of others like ourselves.
The final scene is astonishing, totally unpredictable and shocking, yet absolutely in harmony with the rest of the book. It puts the whole into haunting perspective. Can you imagine something both horrifying and beautiful? That's what this ending is. Only a genius could create an ending like this and make it work. It will haunt you.
Is there a word for killing the poor? There's homicide and suicide and regicide and fratricide and genocide. But is there such a word as paupricide? I doubt it, because the poor aren't important enough to worry about killing. The poor exist to pick our lettuce and sweep our floors and dig our ditches and anything else we don't want to do. Who cares if they die?
This is a story about the poor tenant farmers in the 1930s who could not make the payments on the small plots of land that kept them alive in Oklahoma and other states tormented by bad weather. They were evicted, their houses plowed under by tractors. Many of them fled to California, where they were told there was plenty of work as farm laborers.
The Joad family – Tom (just paroled), Ma, Pa, Grampa, Granma, Noah, Al, Ruthie, Winfield, and Rose of Sharon (pregnant wife of Connie) – is only one among many thousands that crowded into the state, competing after too few jobs. They start out with 12 family members and one friend of the family. By the time they reach California, they have lost 6 of their number, to the snapping wolves of death, sickness, starvation, beatings, the shock of uprooting, hopelessness, confusion, and the law.
Steinbeck gives each of his characters a deep nobility. They are ordinary and unimportant, and, in his hands, that is noble. These people are nobody special, and so he creates statues of them a thousand feet tall, *because* they are nobody special. They are stupid and weak and gullible and vulnerable, and he treats them with a compassion and tenderness that I can only describe as Christ-like. Because they are imperfect. Because when we are weak, then we are strong.
Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it's easy to see why. I would give my left arm to have written any one page of this book. The writing is lyrical and beautiful, effortlessly and inconspicuously poetic. He transforms the brewing of a pot of coffee or the fixing of a truck engine into a sacrament. It is almost a single long epic poem, the Odyssey (or the Iliad?) of our land. I can imagine a member of the Swedish Academy reading this and thinking, "Yes, that's what we're looking for."
Steinbeck alternates chapters, one specifically about the Joads, the next about the country at large, the big picture. This is effective in several ways. To focus solely on the Joads would be unendurably painful. The big picture makes a welcome break, as well as the opportunity to mentally lift the head and see the forces – economic, political, psychological, religious – at work in the land at the time. There is one chapter on a turtle crossing a road that is a little gem of writing and symbolism.
The book reminds me of Steinbeck's also-magnificent "Of Mice and Men" in the way they both proceed inevitably to their inescapable ends, like the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Indeed, it's not hard to see the earlier "Of Mice and Men" as the warm-up swings before hitting this towering homer. These are Steinbeck's "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet."
It's hard to imagine how people like the Joads didn't revolt against the system, turning the suffering country into another Communist nation like Russia or China. I attribute the fact that this did not happen to Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood. People were given enough hope, and enough distraction, to turn their thoughts from that dark road. But it would not have been surprising if things had turned out very differently. The title of the novel comes from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe (quoting Revelation):
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
It suggests a righteous judgment, long suspended, bursting upon the world. You find yourself wishing that that would happen in this book, to save these people.
I know that, if the same kind of calamity ever happened to us, we would not survive as well as the Joads. We are too far from the necessities of life. We know nothing of food and work. Cut off our Internet and bank accounts and utilities and we would be dead within weeks.
Sorry if I've strayed too far into the spiritual, but the book has a spiritual undercurrent. Don't worry: the only time you read "Jesus" is as a curse, and the only religious characters are a deeply flawed preacher and a self-righteous moron for whom pleasure=sin. Still, there's more there than just the world. When Ma Joad says that she's learned that if you ever need help go to a poor person, that's a hint at this kind of faith. Something bigger than ourselves, but perhaps composed of the best parts of others like ourselves.
The final scene is astonishing, totally unpredictable and shocking, yet absolutely in harmony with the rest of the book. It puts the whole into haunting perspective. Can you imagine something both horrifying and beautiful? That's what this ending is. Only a genius could create an ending like this and make it work. It will haunt you.
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