2015 read #45: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
196 pages
Published 1945
Read from August 30 to September 2
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Having absorbed a vague idea of Steinbeck as a champion of the proletariat, I had invented a picture in my head of what Cannery Row would be, a sort of fishified follow-up to The Jungle, furnished with my own details of cannery thugs suppressing a movement to unionize and crooked California cops cracking heads among the Dustbowl spillover from the Central Valley. The actual Cannery Row, a humorous and low-key character study of genial vagrants, eccentrics, and casual wife-beaters living and drinking in the low-rent lots abutting the canneries, wasn't at all what I had imagined, but having read Travels with Charley, I can't say I was especially taken off-guard. I now have a general sense of what I might call the Steinbeckian mode, a wry Californian slant on the eccentric character sketch, also observable in the (much later, of course) below-poverty-line vignettes in Silver Jews songs. I appreciate any author who can furnish me with an eponymous adjective, especially when she or he gives a name to something I enjoy.

Planting Cannery Row firmly into its time period is a through-line of "woman-hating" (in the early twentieth century sense), a thesis examined by comparing the blissful bachelor life of Mack and his boys with the penultimate chapter, which depicts a gopher growing fat and happy in a choice burrowing spot on Cannery Row, but finding only trouble when he goes out to seek a mate, and finally abandoning his idyllic spot and risking traps in order to secure female companionship. That, too, seems Steinbeckian, to judge from Steinbeck's depictions of his final marriage in Travels ("She was a real woman, which meant that she was attracted to real men" -- a paraphrase). The most fascinating character by far, Doc adds the complication of love lost to this theme, perhaps the contrast of a subtler, more educated, more introverted mind approaching the problem of what constitutes happiness in life.