If you’re a big admirer of East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s classic American novel, and are looking to read another article confirming your belief that it’s a masterful work of art, I’m sorry to disappoint, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Because I was, to put it lightly, not a fan of this book. Not only is it a slog to get through, but East of Eden is also a novel loaded with dull, one-note characters who, along with the book’s lackluster story, I found to be not the least bit engaging.
Steinbeck opens East of Eden with a seven-page chapter describing the Salinas Valley in Northern California. His writing here is excruciatingly bland. Steinbeck’s prose, in general, is far from beautiful or flowery, with him writing in a very matter-of-fact, informative style.
This dry information dump to open the 600-page novel is certainly a choice, and I expect many modern readers who are used to a more engaging writing style will be immediately turned off. The book, sadly, does not get better from here. After reading around 150 pages of the novel, I actually had to take a break of several weeks due to being so bored and frustrated with it.
Much of my initial frustration (which continued throughout the rest of the book) came from Steinbeck’s characters. Recently, I read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. That book contains some of the best characters ever written. Every character in that novel (and there are plenty of them) feels like a real person, with fully realized faults, virtues, and complexities. The cast in East of Eden is the exact opposite of that.
Steinbeck has assembled a group of the least complex, most one-note characters ever put to the page. It’s fine to have characters serve as symbols, but they should still feel at least somewhat like real people, or even just be interesting in some way. Nope, not here.
Cathy, the most memorable of the book’s characters, is a heartless monster (for no reason). A character like this, with zero depth beyond the “she’s missing something that makes her human” idea, is simply not very interesting. She’s bad; we get it.
Adam, who’s sort of the novel’s main character (it’s really an ensemble work, but he’s in it the most), is immediately smitten with Cathy for absolutely zero reason. Adam is an extremely annoying character, who doesn’t act like a normal person at all. Lee, the Chinese servant who works for Adam, is a generic wise Asian stereotype character that I also found to be equally insufferable.
A good number of the book’s characters are based on members of John Steinbeck’s actual family. Samuel Hamilton, the patriarch of this group, and his brood of a seemingly endless number of offspring are about as interesting and exciting as looking at any stranger’s family tree might be.
Steinbeck is obviously very interested in philosophy and characters as symbols. East of Eden is, after all, a sort of modern retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. However, Steinbeck’s points and ideas are so simplistic that they really offer nothing beyond what a grade school student could come up with. There is good and evil. But is there a grey area in between? Are we free to choose? It’s all just very basic stuff and not at all insightful.
Overall, this was a really rough one and quite tough to get through. It’s a series of boring things happening to a boring group of characters who feel like cardboard cutouts of real people. I didn’t care what happened to anyone. I suspect I found so many of them annoying precisely because they were so one-note.
I wasn’t a fan of Steinbeck’s writing style. Or his plot. Or (definitely not!) his characters. I can appreciate that some people love his novels, but this book certainly wasn’t for me.
Grade: 3/10