John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945)
I used to love John Steinbeck, around the same time that I loved Def Leppard’s Hysteria. Not everything holds up. As I got older, Steinbeck’s dime-store preachiness began to seem cloying, and I thought of Cannery Row as his novel with the least of that stuff. Rereading it again, I’m sorry to say that it too suffers from the usual Steinbeckian defects.
I read this book somewhere in India, or at least I think I did. My travel notes mention that I read Steinbeck, and I can’t imagine what other book of his I might have read, but I honestly don’t remember when or where I read Cannery Row on that trip.
Reading it now, it’s an interesting contrast to On the Road, written around the same time. Kerouac and Steinbeck both write about bummy folks in California, but where Steinbeck valorizes and patronizes his poor characters, turning them into clowns or saints or clown-saints, Kerouac actually lives among them, is one of them. Cannery Row is an elegy; On the Road is an ejaculation.
And what hath all this to do with India? Not much, I’m afraid, except that I probably felt back then like Steinbeck was doing something noble in trying to give humanity to the poor, something India can make extremely difficult.