East of Eden by John Steinbeck

 

   Like most Americans of my generation, I read a couple of novels by John Steinbeck in the course of my education. In my case—maybe in everybody's case—one of them was Of Mice and Men, but I also read The Pearl. I remember enjoying them, but somehow, as I matured as a reader, I never wanted to continue through Steinbeck's oeuvre. I'm glad that some friends invited me to join in a group read of East of Eden, because, though I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own, I enjoyed it tremendously.

    I tend to dislike books overburdened with "philosophy" and "messages." East of Eden is rich in both, but somehow they don't capsize the ship. Using the story of Cain and Abel as his source, Steinbeck is able to reflect on family, on what he would have called "blood" but  we now prefer to think of as DNA, and most effectively on good and evil. 

To say that everyone has some bad, some evil, some of the devil in them is banal. What Steinbeck does is remind us of what is too easy to forget: Everyone also has some good. The one exception in the novel is Cathy, but it is clear that she is an exception. She is, in short, a psychopath, though Steinbeck never uses the word. In showing us characters who are, with the exception of Cathy, both good and bad, Steinbeck gives us human beings, not the sort of cardboard cutouts that commonly appear in novels as freighted with philosophy as this one. This is why his novel succeeds.

The one character where he stumbles a bit is Lee, the protagonist's Chinese servant. It's a pleasure to see a non-white character presented as wise and humorous (in contrast to Steinbeck's take on native Americans), but alas, in the end Lee is a stereotype: the wise Oriental (he actually does quote Confucius at one point).

That's a quibble, though. This is a novel well worth reading.