East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

(New York: Penguin Books, 1986)

Paperback, 778 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780140049978, US$7.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

A searing novel about the oldest and most terrible of conflicts: brother against brother.

From the Cover: Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives, nurtured by the love of all around him; the other grows up in loneliness, enveloped in a mysterious darkness. As Steinbeck interweaves the stories of the Trasks and their neighbors, the prosperous, open-hearted Hamiltons, he portrays men and women determined to conquer not only the land but the forces of love and hate, trust and suspicion within their hearts.

My Review: Someone once said Hemingway influenced the way people write, but that Steinbeck influenced what people write about. This is obviously true with The Grapes of Wrath, and … to a certain extent … with East of Eden. Despite all my prior misgivings about Steinbeck as an author, and about East of Eden as a novel, I found myself really getting into this novel and, by the end, really enjoying it.

From what I understand, Steinbeck set out to do with East of Eden was threefold: (1) tell his family history, (2) retell the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, and (3) to tell the story of the human family. To say the least, this is ambitious at the very best, and would probably be foolish in the hands of most authors. In my reading of East of Eden, I think that Steinbeck has accomplished these three goals. What is most interesting, though, is that Steinbeck takes all of the Reader’s expectations about how they think that the story of Cain and Abel plays out and stands it all on its head. He certainly sets the Reader up to expect certain actions from specific characters with his use of “C” and “A” names: Charles and Adam and Cal and Aron in particular, but there’s also the character of Cathy, whom we’ll get to in a minute.

The Cain and Abel aspects of this novel, including two lengthy discussions of the story by the characters (especially that between Adam, Lee and Samuel in Chapter 24), are very interesting in that Steinbeck seems to be working out the story and its implications for himself and dwells, in particular, on the Hebrew word Timshel which means “Thou Mayest” as in “thou mayest overcome sin,” meaning that God is leaving it up to mankind to overcome their sins, it is not a given and it is not a command, it is a choice, and choice seems to be what East of Eden is all about: making the choice to either overcome one’s sins, or not.

This is the choice that Charles must make, it is the one that Adam must make, that Cal must make, and that Aron must make. They each are able to, to a greater or lesser degree, some better than others, and in spite of their “A” or “C” names, neither Charles not Cal are strictly Cain just as neither Adam nor Aron are strictly Abel. Steinbeck has done a marvelous job of winding the two characters together and making them much more complex than the Bible makes them out to be. (Of course, the Bible doesn’t have the character development that Steinbeck does, so it’s possible that Cain and Abel are more complex than we know, but I guess it’s a mostly moot point.)

Well, this then brings us to Cathy. Cathy Cathy Cathy. My favorite cover for East of Eden deals with Cathy, and while it is not the one I own, it is one that I am dying to get my hot little hands on. (It can be found HERE, if you are curious. I love it because it takes one part of the story that is barely a page long and spins it way out and makes this a novel all about Cathy, rather than Adam and Aron and Cal. Plus, I just love pulp covers, there’s not a lot better than a pulp fiction cover from the 30s, 40s and 50s.) Anyway, back to what I was saying, in my review for the audiobook edition of Eclipse, I mentioned that the villain in that novel, Victoria, is one of the better bad guys out there, but honestly, she can’t hold a candle to Steinbeck’s Cathy. Cathy is truly an evil and an irredeemable character, I know in my class there were those who defended Cathy (to a certain degree, you can’t defend a character like Cathy 100%), but I see no defense to be made for Cathy and no redemption, even at the end.

The bottom line, though, is that I loved The Grapes of Wrath and hated The Pearl and I was afraid of making East of Eden a tie-breaker when it came to my feelings towards Steinbeck as an author. If there was any doubt in my mind before, it is gone after reading East of Eden, Steinbeck is an amazing author and this is a novel that I would recommend to just about everyone without any reservations whatsoever.