East of Eden
I’m still out here reading books. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was about 17, didn’t like it, and remember none of it whatsoever (other than “here’s the grapes, and here’s the wrath”, which was Nelson in the Simpsons, to this day I still say “yes, yes, very good wrath”) so I’m going to consider myself as not having read any Steinbeck. Now that I have, I can safely say he’s pretty good at this. I expected the poverty, the struggle to survive and make ends meet out in the American west. I did not expect how constantly funny this was. I definitely did not expect Cathy. He will drop an all-timer paragraph or character interaction, and then do it again on the next page, hit after hit. I always thought you can pick out the best, most enduring fiction by plucking any two characters and getting deeply invested about how they would interact, because they have clear inner lives and motivation.
The whole thing is a riff on Cain and Abel, with two generations of brothers. The older pair are Charles and Adam (yes, C&A) Trask, and the younger set are Adam’s twin sons, Caleb and Aron (oops there it is again). Adam is a gentle soul and Charles, at least when young, is a bit of a psycho who beats Adam half to death because (ultimately) their father loves Adam but not Charles. Their father was an army guy who faked a very impressive CV, and had Adam (not Charles, too crazy) follow in his footsteps and join the army. Also we have Sam Hamilton, all around good guy, genius inventor who never makes a penny from his creations because he files patents and never does anything about them. It’s all extremely well written, everyone has rich psychological depth, it’s, as I said, at times very funny. Then Mr. Steinbeck drops a fucking supervillain in the middle of it.
Cathy framed two classmates for rape, drove a teacher to suicide and tried to run away by the time she was 16. Her parents found her and brought her home so she deliberately burned the house down with them inside, faking her own death in the process. She takes up prostitution until she gets beaten to a bloody pulp and crawls to Charles and Adam’s farm. Adam nurses her back to health, falls in love with her and convinces her to marry him. Everyone else who meets her looks her in the eye and intuits immediately that she has no soul. She gets pregnant (might be Adam, might be Charles) and tries to abort it herself with a knitting needle. It doesn’t work, and pretty much immediately after giving birth, she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves. A real tour de force.
Adam doesn’t really get over it. He lets his land wither. His children aren’t named until they’re over a year old when Sam Hamilton comes over and punches him in the face for not having done it yet. Adam also has a Chinese servant named Lee, who gets introduced talking horrible phonetic pidgin English which made me cringe thinking this was one of those “well, it’s of its time” things. However, then Lee comes out talking in perfect articulate English, telling Sam that he just keeps up the pidgin because it’s what people expect of him. He and Sam (and Adam, sometimes) have long philosophical debates, including a big one about the meaning of a single Hebrew word in the Cain and Abel story (timshel), which I had somehow come across the conclusion of in a Dog Man book beforehand. Unexpected. I checked further and Dog Man is full of Steinbeck references.
Cathy becomes Kate and takes over a brothel in town. In a real evil masterstroke, she charms the madam into naming her, Kate, as her successor in a legal document and then kills her. It would be really obvious, under normal circumstances, that she had been murdered for the business except Kate killed her by poisoning her and giving her botulism, and to evade suspicion she gives herself botulism as well and nearly dies also. It’s hard to beat an argument of “what, I gave myself botulism too?”.
We move on a bit to East of Eden: The Next Generation, with Adam’s kids. Aron is the sensitive one who decides to marry the first girl he ever sees in person (Abra), and goes to college, and wants to go into the priesthood. Caleb is the practical one who goes straight into business with Hamilton’s son. Both sons have the same kind of relationship with their father as Adam (and Charles) did, fretting over which one of them he loves more (or at all), with the added complication of everyone gradually realising the identity of Kate/Cathy. Where Charles beat the shit out of Adam, and the latter joined the army and both settled into a distant but cordial relationship, Caleb mirrors this somewhat by bringing Aron to meet their mother in an act of psychic violence. It sure works, because where Adam and Charles eventually got over it, Aron immediately enlists for the ongoing World War 1 and gets killed on the front line, causing Adam to have a stroke. Will Adam and Caleb reconcile? Will it tie in to the big debate over the Cain and Abel translation? If you have read this far I have given away the entire story apart from the literal last page, so that, reader I leave to you.