The Grapes of Wrath

It would seem that after all these years this book would be a mark of foregone history. Yet, with everything that is going on in the US and the gradual loss of power of the middle class with businesses replaced by robots, there is a chilling parallel that can be drawn, especially in the suffering of families.
It was a long and tough read, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I particularly liked Ma's toughness and Tom's rebelliousness. The ending is cause for pause, but to my mind shows how unnatural circumstances will call for unnatural actions.

What a fantastic way to begin the year's reading. I know this is a classic, and there would be little debate about its place in American literature. I probably don't have any unique commentary on this work. But I was surprised at how much I was "sucked in" to this book, and how much it stayed with me during the times I was not reading.

The powerful themes in this book, for me, were 1) the desperation of the migrant families, and 2) the intense drive to keep families together. Steinbeck is able to convey the sense of desperation so vividly, both through the Joad's experiences and through the chapters describing the world around them: the car salesmen, the people who buy off farmers' assets, the growers/canners in California, the effect of show more the heavy rain. And then Ma Joad's intensity around keeping the family intact throughout, and her ultimate failure to do so, is just heartbreaking. I can't imagine what it felt like, in an age without email and mobile telephones, to have one of your children go off in search of a better life on their own.

I know the ending is meant to cast a ray of hope, but I was left wondering what would happen next to these poor people, stranded in a barn in a flood with no money, no food, and no hopes.

Another thread running through my mind as I read was about society's apparent need to find a lower class who can be mistreated. In this book, and in that time period, it was the migrant workers. Today, we have found immigrants to do similar labor and their living conditions in many cases are not much better than the Joad's. There are many other groups who are also marginalized. Why is this? And why is it so difficult to eradicate this pattern of hate and discrimination?

Originally posted January 17 2007 on my LiveJournal blog:
http://laura0218.livejournal.com/1326.html show less

By good fortune, I happened to be in the middle of the book during the weekend NPR was running a centennial celebration of Woody Guthrie, who famously immortalized the protagonist Tom Joad in one of his songs and left a proud legacy of music immortalizing these times that Steinbeck was able to capture through words. I had somehow never been assigned this book to read during high school, and having read it so much later in life I feel cheated in a way (even if I did see the fairly good 1940 movie version in college), because it was excellent, easily deserving of all the fame it's gotten over the years. In the background, of course, this is a book about the effects of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression on the people of the lowland South show more and Great Plains, but Steinbeck's skill as a writer is how he's able to smoothly work in the economic transformations convulsing the country - the farm crisis, the rack-rents, deflation, Hoovervilles, company stores, wage-cutting, police corruption, and union-busting - while placing the reader's main focus on the transformations of the Joad family, their own moving emotional arcs from hope to hurt and back again. It's a story about what the Depression did to people, the things they had to do to survive as their land was taken from them and they suffered loss upon loss, and the layering of the themes of sin and redemption were quite well-done, easily on the level of Victor Hugo or Emile Zola. I've read a few books about the Depression era recently, and the human faces here definitely hit me more effectively than any number of charts and graphs. One thing that struck me during my reading was what a great hidden history of the Scotch-Irish this was as well; many of the migrants streaming into California during this time period were re-enacting the flight of their ancestors from Ulster after similar economic troubles afflicted them. David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed went into a good amount of detail about the hardscrabble life these strongly religious people both escaped from and set up again in the hills of Appalachia, and the Okies in this book were seemingly just playing out another ironic act in that story. Having only read the extremely short Of Mice and Men before, I can't really say how typical this level of writing is from Steinbeck, but I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for more of his works. I saw that there were somehow negative reviews of this masterpiece of American literature, and after reading a few of those I can only conclude that those people don't enjoy books with memorable characters, great dialogue, strong narratives, or vivid portrayals of everyday life. I can see where Charles Portis got a lot of his writerly tricks from here, and this would certainly place highly in any list of the best American novels of the 20th century. show less

I’m fifty years old, I’ve read literally thousands of books, and I’m not aware that I’ve ever read a novel written by John Steinbeck. Recognizing this deficiency, I ordered a Steinbeck collection, seven of his most celebrated works including The Grapes of Wrath. I vaguely recall seeing the film starring Henry Fonda, and am well aware of the plot and the historical backdrop, but nothing can take the place of reading the work itself.

As most know, the book details the westward migration of the Joad family, as they are uprooted from their Oklahoma homestead by the evils of the Great Depression, the Oklahoma dust bowl and the advent of mechanized farming. The family harbors visions of milk and honey awaiting their arrival in show more California, or so they are assured by the numerous handbills promising plentiful work and bountiful riches. What await them instead are rapacious labor recruiters, unfriendly natives and slow but sure starvation.

Steinbeck certainly succeeds in painting a vivid and stark picture of the hopelessness faced by the migrants. His chapters alternate between “big picture” overviews and the particular heartbreaks and hazards faced by the Joads in particular. The story is an education in economics, labor relations, politics and human nature. In this day and age, it is difficult to conceive of children literally starving to death in the shadow of the most productive agricultural land in the country, much of it lying fallow and off limits to those that were capable of growing the food to nourish their own families.

This is a very powerful novel, both with regard to the emotions that it taps and the beliefs and conceptions that one holds. It provides a sharp contrast between a period when so many were desperate to work for as little as something to eat, to one in which so many demand so much without having to lift a finger. There must be a happy medium. show less

I am perhaps digging my own grave by giving a negative review to the well-respected Steinbeck, but Grapes of Wrath is a sore disappointment. Steinbeck's epic is a thinly disguised forum for political, social, and religious dialogue. Unlike great literature, which can address any number of complexities or issues in the context of a larger narrative, Steinbeck presents a only a set of ideas and bends flat characters and a thin plot around these views. His characters are intended only for metaphorical interpretation and offer little substance.

Steinbeck's "interchapters," which portray misery through broad, sweeping claims (without engaging any of the main characters or advancing the plot), are the book's most interesting portions, despite show more the emotional manipulation that they set forth. To add insult to injury, the novel itself is barely literary. It feels as though Steinbeck is following a checklist of what to include in a novel. (Foreshadowing? Check. Symbolism? Check. Conflict? You betcha.) This would be bad enough by itself, but it isn't even done subtly. Steinbeck might as well have put up neon signs pointing out the literary devices used. He seems to cram as much into the novel as he can, only for the sake of including, rather than for any intrinsic merit. Finally, the messages themselves are somewhat strange. The tone of much of the novel can be described as guilt-mongering - Steinbeck's characters are in a particularly bleak situation, victimized by the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and capitalist land owners - and the readers are made to feel guilty for something that others have done. At the risk of repeating myself, this guilt comes from the narrator's direct condemnations, not through the reader's own understanding of the text or connection with the characters.

Moreover, the book has many religious themes - from the prose style, which imitates the text of the Old Testament, to the very title, which alludes to Revelation - yet the religious "messages" are quite sacrilegious. The main protagonist's epiphany comes from rejecting traditional doctrines (even the idea that all humans have a soul) in exchange for looser, pseudo-Christian ideals. The characters in the text who support traditional ideals are either evil hypocrites or in the case of the heroes (specifically, Granma) laughable, foolish, and senile because of their naive ignorance. This book does not present ideas in an intellectual fashion; it is not worthy to be counted among the greats. I am not criticizing the inclusion of a set of ideas, or even of the Marxist, communist, or religious undertones. I am criticizing Steinbeck's absolute failure write a story with a moral. He opts, instead, for a moral disguised as a story. show less

I am 53 and had never read anything Steinbeck! Not in high school, not in college and certainly not for fun, after all, the classics are boring - right?!

WRONG!! If you haven't read it - RUN, not walk, and get yourself a copy. You won't regret it.

As soon as I started, GoW got me. The writing style blew my mind. Steinbeck is a master. He paints the picture so completely, with such simple, yet powerful prose...I almost felt I was an Okie, too!

The horrible realities faced by the Joad family remind us how life can change in the blink of an eye (esp true now). Family is everything. Strength is instinctive - you do what you have to do to survive. The bottom is never really the bottom.

In the end, GoW confirmed what I have always lived by : show more Everything happens for a reason. There MUST be a higher power guiding events in our lives.... if not, what's the point! show less

I read up to chapter 11, then read reviews and summaries of the book before reading the ending and moving this to my “did not finish” shelf.

(Note: I had to create a “did not finish” shelf just for this book. I am not the sort to perpetually start reading books only to toss them aside unfinished.)

I could see what the author was doing and appreciated that he accomplished his goal so well but I just have no interest in spending more hours of my life continuing to read the rest of the book.

The descriptive scenes of the environment are beautifully cinematic in their composition and there is a description of an iron man on an iron monster (a tractor driven by a man who has become little more than a replaceable cog in a wheel) that show more is so stunningly written that I dog-eared the page so I could easily find it again.

Aside from those two things of note, however, the book has no redeeming qualities. Not every story needs to have a happy ending or to be uplifting or positive or hopeful to be a good one (this one has none of those qualities), but when it is also not in the least bit enjoyable to read, I have a hard time justifying spending time I can never regain on continuing to read it.

Not one of the characters introduced thus far is at all likable or endearing. Their dialogue is so excessively riddled with profanity that I counted over 80 occurrances before I stopped numbering them (and remember, I only read chapters 1-10). The ending is not at all satisfying and is actually quite strange; perhaps even a little disturbing.

All in all, this was just not the book for me. There are others that I think far more worthy of the descriptors commonly bestowed upon masterful works, and I could not be happier (or more relieved) to put this book away knowing I shall never finish it so I can move on to another (much better) classic. show less