A friend of mine from high school has, for the past several years, occasionally reminded me that I needed to read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I have previously read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (a high school requirement) and The Grapes of Wrath (just because). Both are excellent. My friend apparently considers East of Eden his all-time favorite. We came to something of an agreement on Facebook a few months ago that I would read East of Eden when I finished The Once and Future King, and he may give White’s book a chance himself. Besides, I did see the movie version of this story last January. Would the book work as well if I knew what was coming?
As it is, that movie only really covers the final 15 or so chapters. Furthermore, this was a great book, and the only reason it took me as long as it did to read it is because I typically read multiple books at once. Point is, I may be finishing Little Women soon as I just got East of Eden out of the way.
East of Eden is billed as the story of two families. One is the Trask family, who basically keep relieving the story of Cain and Abel over multiple generations. The other is the Hamilton family, based on Steinbeck’s own maternal grandfather’s family, to the point where Steinbeck occasionally inserts himself as a child into the book. But as the book goes on, it becomes less about the Hamiltons and more about the Trasks. Adam Track, after a stint in the Army when his father more or less forced him into soldierdom, moves from New England to California with his half of the large fortune he and his brother Charles inherited from their late father. How the dead man got the money is unknown. Charles assumed he stole it. Adam decides he somehow earned it. The two brothers separate, but not before they find the badly beaten Cathy Ames on their doorstep. Just as Adam sees nothing but goodness in the world, Cathy sees nothing but evil, and she sees Adam as someone she can manipulate a bit while Charles spooks her. She and Adam marry and move to California, a place where she repeatedly insists she doesn’t want to be and he repeatedly decides she doesn’t mean it. She gives birth to twins, shoots Adam (nonfatally) and goes back to her one true profession, prostitution, in a nearby town. Adam eventually gets over all this with help from his friend and neighbor Samuel Hamilton and the Chinese cook that works for him before more or less becoming a member of the family, a man named Lee.
Good on Steinbeck, by the by, for showing Lee is more than a racial stereotype. Sure, there’s probably still problematic aspects to the character, but Lee introduces himself as someone who pretends to speak broken English until he decides to trust and befriend someone, starting with Samuel.
Anyway, there’s a lot to this book, and I suspect if I really wanted to, I could write a very long article on everything that happens and what it meant to me. However, I try to keep my reviews relatively short, so I probably won’t. Plus, given the sheer amount of ideas and themes at play here, I am not sure I could. Regardless, given the Biblical parallels, it isn’t a surprise that good and evil are a major theme of the work. Adam is a good man, but also one that people can seemingly take advantage of. Very few do, but even after Cathy shoots him, and even after he finds her again, he can never bring himself to try and hurt her back. Likewise, she never sees him as anything less than a fool she can manipulate even when it becomes clear she probably can’t. Theirs is a complicated relationship, as was the one Adam had with Charles, and Charles like Cain tried to murder Adam once over the subject of gifts when Adam just found a stray puppy for his father’s birthday while Charles worked hard to earn enough money to buy a good knife, only to see his father prefer the dog to the knife, to the point where the father never even used the knife but took the dog everywhere.
The other big concept seems to be what it means to be a man. Adam’s father Cyrus believes in the Army as an institution for becoming one regardless of his two sons’ intentions. Adam doesn’t want to go, but he’s more pliable. He’s sent. Charles is more belligerent and would probably enjoy it for what Cyrus believes would be the wrong reasons. Cyrus won’t let him join. Many things Adam does as the book progresses through the rest of his life focus on doing what he considers the right thing to do. When Charles dies and leaves a fortune to be split between Adam and Cathy, Charles seemingly not knowing Cathy had split, Adam still ensures his estranged wife gets her share. He works for the draft board during the Great War because he knows someone has to do it and make hard decisions. Samuel Hamilton offers a different view of manhood, one where children are encouraged but more gently, where a good laugh and a good wife are enough of what a person needs, while possessing the wisdom to see what Cathy really is from the moment he sets eyes on her. Lee, on the other hand, is depicted as a good listener, though the others rarely want the advice he gives while knowing full well he’s often right.
In the novel’s last section, as Adam’s sons Cal and Aron start to become men, the pattern set by Adam and Charles seems to be repeating itself, but in a different way. If anything, Steinbeck offers another path, one that suggests free will is still a thing. Cal struggles with his nature versus his nurture, well aware that people were naturally more inclined to like Aron than himself. Likewise, Aron’s girlfriend Abra sees herself as a person with a warring good and evil side. The novel ends with those two, more or less together, and the idea exists that the pattern can be broken if forgiveness can be granted and permission given to be their own selves. Adam didn’t have a choice about joining the Army. He didn’t ask to inherit a fortune. He was left with two boys when Cathy left him. He never really seemed to make many choices in his life as life made his decisions for him. But it didn’t have to be that way, and for someone like Cal, knowing the cycle can be broken, that may be enough.
Grade: A
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