The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

There are some writers or books you may need to read at certain points in your life to be meaningful. I read The Red Pony and The Pearl in high school, and I'm pretty sure I read Grapes of Wrath around then too, and of course saw the movie with Henry Fonda. But it didn't really make an impression. Now, more than a few decades later, it does. Steinbeck is a wizard. I marvel at how he writes dense, lush prose that is still simple and clear. I marvel at how "Okie" dialect becomes poetry in his hands. I marvel at how he weaves Biblical tales and ideas with a sure and yet light hand. And I despair at how nothing has changed in the US: the very words, the exact taunts and insults hurled at native-born, poor white American migrants in the 1930s are now used verbatim by the Current Occupant of the White House against desperate Latinx migrants.

Grim, depressing, gorgeous, vivid, tragic, and beautiful. ( )

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 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. ( )

This is turning into my year of audiobooks. Lately I have been unable to find time to read, but I can listen to books as I do housework, and especially as I drive, and driving is what I do. My husband and I are farmers in an isolated area in the Canadian prairies. The closest town is 80 km away, and trips to various towns for machinery parts, doctor appointments, banking or groceries are part of my life. So for the past few days now I have been listening to The Grapes of Wrath as I drive through fields of wheat and canola just a couple of weeks ahead of harvest.
This area was also hit hard by the drought and economic depression of the thirties. People packed their belongings and left behind houses and barns, plows, stoves, old cars. The skeleton of many of those farm yards are still there. The trees planted for windbreak still survive, and the odd rhubarb or horseradish plant is still thriving. Although these people were not driven away from the land by banks or homeowners, the way the cropsharers in the book were, still people here were victims of the economic catastrophe that were the 1930’s and the farming practices of the time. But, driving by those old shacks day in and day out, it is so easy to group all these families and histories into one big mass of “collateral damage”, and to forget the pain and desperation that finally moved them away from the land.
My husband’s family is among those that stayed and survived the bad years. There is a deep rooted pride in these act of defiance that can be heard in the stories that are retold over and over: how they fed the cattle with the tumbleweed that got caught on the fence wire; how the young men in the family did leave to find work elsewhere and rode in the train freight wagons jumping before arriving at a bigger town not to pay the ticket; how nothing was ever wasted, be it a button, a rag or the blood from a butchered pig that could be cooked into blood sausages.

But the stories of those that left are missing from the local lore. Their passage through here wiped away every time another old shed collapses in the middle of what is now a pasture, or the line of old trees that some woman watered and made thrive in the hot prairie finally dies out.

I have tried to take pictures of those old buildings before they are all gone. So here is some of what I see as I drive fast to town to pick some bearing or belt for a tractor or salt for the cows and listen to The Grapes of Wrath. As for the book, I am about half way through it. If my heart does not break very soon, I will finish it and come back here to post something else. If I don’t it is because it became too close to my heart and I could not even finish it. We shall see…

___________

Well, it is done! I finished it. What else is there to say? It was a very intense and emotional book for me. The first half of the book especially: the connection to the land and the heartbreak of leaving it, then the journey through the countryside and the deaths and separation that followed. The second part dragged a bit. It felt like propaganda at times. Not enough to damage the book overall, but to my 21 century ears the litany of the self-government felt old. Worst, at times the discourse of bad rich people and good poor people felt too black and white, but I am too distant from it, with layers of social policy and legal rights to deafen me from their cries.

The end - or the lack of a more conventional ending - gets to some people. I actually think that it added to the book. Certain stories just don’t end well, or don’t end at all. It would be a relief to see the Joads settled or with lives that have some resemblance of normality. It would come 10 years later, with the economic boom generated by the WW2, and they still had too much ahead of them. I hope they made it back to suburbia somewhere, that All opened a garage, that Ruth got to go to school, that Rose of Sharon had other children, that Tom found his way back to the family…
( )

4.5* ( )

As a self-proclaimed Steinbeck fan, I feel comfortable saying this is one of his best books. The setting is great, the dialogue always moves the story forward and is well written in my opinion, and the chapters detailing the other families in the U.S. is a great refresher from the long chapters about the Joads. Sometimes it can be difficult to read the dialogue because the accent is "thick" and sometimes I had to reread a quote but other than that it was fine. There are a lot of characters in this book, and so I don't blame Steinbeck for not fleshing all of them out, but it really only feels like Mama, Tom, and Casy were real people. Everybody else seems kind of one dimensional, but it's not that big of a problem.
This is practically a must-have for any Steinbeck readers. I also recommend it to anyone who wants to read a semi-historical story about what it was like being a migrant worker during the Depression. ( )