Book Review: East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Book Review

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

     John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a massive, sprawling novel about the intersection of two families in the Salinas Valley of California. It is a complex weaving of themes and psychologies but the length and well-strung together explications of human relations should not deter the reader. Steinbeck’s writing is lucid, fluid, and engaging; it succeeds in being easy to read despite its densely woven themes. Three of these themes permeate the story.

     East of Eden is a stage for a wide range of characters, both major and minor. Adam and Charles are the sons of Cyrus Trask, a Connecticut farmer who gets injured at the beginning of the Civil War; Cyrus lies his way into contact with the highest levels of government and gets rich by stealing. When he dies, his two sons inherit his fortune. Adam and Charles are offhand representations of the Cain and Abel story in the Old Testament. Charles tries but fails to kill Adam. They two eventually grow to respect each other, albeit at a tense and uneasy distance. Adam takes his newfound wife Cathy to Salinas Valley to start a farm. There they encounter Samuel Hamilton, the patriarch of an Irish immigrant family. Samuel is a lovable old guy who helps everybody he can; he has a predilection for making accurate prophecies about the future, raising philosophical issues, and inventing tools that get patented but bring no money to his large and poor family. He can find water, too, which is why he becomes friends with Adam Trask who needs to dig wells for his farm. Meanwhile, Adam’s wife Cathy gives birth to twins, shoots Adam in the shoulder, and leaves the family to manage a whorehouse after changing her name to Kate. The two sons, Aron and Cal, are like Cain and Abel reborn; their sibling rivalry takes up the theme previously introduced by the childhoods of Adam and Charles. Then there is Lee, the Chinese domestic servant who loved Samuel Hamilton and raises Aron and Cal in the absence of their mother. Abra is Aron’s girlfriend.

     The novel starts our with a description of the Salinas Valley; two mountain ranges are separated by a river. The landscape has a presence in the book that permeates all aspects of the story. They valley itself is symbolic since the characters are all separated from each other while in close proximity, just as the river cleaves apart the two mountain ranges that form the same valley. Adam and Charles are divided by their competing love for their father; while Charles can see that Cyrus Trask is a liar, Adam is unable, or possibly unwilling, to see him in the same light. Adam loves Cathy but she is just after his money. The Trasks and Hamiltons live on two different farms but are dissimilar in that Adam Trask seems to fall into wealth without any effort, and takes it for granted, while the Hamiltons work hard and end up poor but closely knit through a tight bond of love for their father, Samuel. The twins Aron and Cal, like day and night, circle around each other as Cal tries to win the love for himself that he thinks is being given to Aron while it is probable that Adam loves both of them equally even though he really understands nothing about either one of them.

     The characters are also blind to aspects of themselves, even though these aspects can be perceived with clarity by the others in the book. This is like the phenomenology of Husserl and Sartre where a total and complete understanding of the self is impossible since we only see ourselves in fragments; it is up to ourselves to string the fragments together and choose what they mean, all the while knowing that this process can never be complete. After Cathy leaves Adam, Samuel has to make him realize that he is ruining his children’s lives by living in a self-absorbed trance of despondency. Adam was so depressed he had not even bothered to give his sons names. The ever-naive Adam is the one man who explains Kate’s true nature to herself; his psychopathic wife is incapable of seeing the good side of any person which probably is the reason she becomes so successful in her career as the madam of the seediest bordello in Salinas (circus shows with donkeys performed for politicians?) Cal has to explain Aron’s thinking and behavior to just about everyone and most people do not actually see Aron for what he is since his good looks make that almost impossible. Cal has to explain to Abra that he thinks Adam loves Aron so much more because Aron physically resembles Kate and Adam has never stopped loving her. And so on. The different people are so intertwined in their society that they can not be understood without the others parsing and explaining their psychological makeup. The hidden sides of each person are revealed through the explanation of others and, interestingly enough, some of these sides are hidden because people lie. They lie to each other as well as themselves but quite often this is done with good intentions. This brings up the issue of choice.

     Another major theme that runs throughout East of Eden is the conflict between good and evil; as Steinbeck says at one point in the narrative, that is the only story that has ever been told. Good and evil are the extremes and all humans are caught in the webs that bind the two inextricably together. What each human being is worth in the end is what choices they make in the navigation of those webs. When Adam realizes he needs to name his twins, he sits down with Samuel and Lee to discuss the biblical story of the twins Cain and Abel. After Cain kills Abel, God tells Cain that he can do good or he can do bad, but he must choose for himself what he will do. This is exemplified, as Lee says, by the Hebrew word timshel.

     The people who inhabit the communities of Salinas have to face choices all along. When Lee decides to quit his job as the Trask family’s domestic servant, he changes his mind and returns because he knows he had found his place in the world as the guardian of the twins and the best friend of Adam. Samuel feels shy about confronting Adam during his depression but chooses to do so because he realizes he has to help his friend. Kate chooses to leave the family and restart in a lifestyle that is destructive to herself and everyone she associates with. Adam has to choose to confront Kate at the whorehouse so he can move on with his life. Lee explains to Cal that any bad things he does in life are his choice and he has to own up to them rather than placing blame on an inherited nature he got from his mother. Aron chooses to run away from the good life that has fallen, seemingly without effort, into his lap. The necessity of choice and personal responsibility is the crux of the entire novel. Jean-Paul Sartre would have said these people were imprisoned in a sea of choices.

     The third major theme in East of Eden, which also serves a narrative function, is related to choice and the conflict between good and evil as well. Steinbeck describes this as a pendulum swinging from one side to the other. At the beginning of the story, Charles tries to kill Adam; he fails and the two brothers grow up to respect each other. On the other hand, Cal does not try to kill Aron but he blames himself for Aron’s death and the two never reconcile their conflicts.

     Another pendulum swing involves both Adam and Aron who make the same mistake in their love lives with similar but different consequences. Adam builds up a fantasy about who Kate really is, falls in love with the fantasy, and then gets devastated when the reality does not match. Aron also builds up a fantasy, not just about his mother Kate who he believes is dead and buried back East, but also about his girlfriend Abra. Aron loses himself in a religious dream about her purity and perfection but she realizes she can not live up to his fantasy and liberates herself by losing her love for him and pursuing a good life rather than a perfect life.

     A thematic swing occurs between Cal and Adam when Adam loses a lot of money in a failed business venture; Adam does not care much about his loss but his son Cal does. While Adam is hopelessly naive about the way the world works, Cal is worldly and savvy at a young age and catches on to business easily. He invests some of Lee’s money in bean farming and makes a healthy profit only to be disappointed when Adam refuses to take the money as a gift.

     One major narrative swing that may not be apparent at first glance is how Lee replaces Kate in the family’s life. Kate abandons the family for a life of vice but Lee remains to act as a mother figure. He cooks, cleans, and does all the wifely duties except for one. Or is it implied that he does that one too? Lee develops a relationship with Adam that is so close you can almost consider them significant others. Even Lee’s housekeeping is described as wifely; when the sheriff pays a visit to the Trasks, he notices that the flowery decorations in the house seem awfully feminine considering it is a family of all men, something he attributes to the efforts of Lee while also observing that Adam is oblivious to the décor. Just like a typical married couple? Lee is a narrative auto-correction for Kate without Adam realizing it. Kate leaves and never comes back; Lee leaves and returns immediately because he loves his adopted family. But Kate is more like Lee than one might at first imagine as well. Both of them use opium, by the way. As the madam of a whorehouse, she watches over the prostitutes and men who work there like a mother; while she may not manage her stable out of love, she does watch over them like a mother managing a surrogate family, feeding them, cleaning them, clothing them, and doctoring them when they get sick.

     The pendulum swings inside the mind of Kate too. After learning that Aron attends church, she goes to see him there. She learns he will be going off to college soon so she contemplates giving him his own private circus show as a going away gift. (Thanks Mom, I guess you really do love and understand me after all) After living a life of evil, she decides to leave her fortune to him as an inheritance. She does not mention Cal in her will; she knows he inherited her nature and Aron inherited her looks. Is the will her final act of redemption before death? Or is it just one further act an act of vanity? Does she get fascinated with Aron because he resembles her physically rather than because of what he is like as a person? Maybe it is left open ended so the reader can decide. Steinbeck encourages us to draw our own conclusions.

     While Lee acts as a substitute wife and mother for the Trask family, he also takes on anotherly role when Samuel Hamilton dies. At that point he becomes the sage and philosopher of East of Eden, taking over where his idol left off. He becomes the advice giver for Adam and Cal when they need help with making decisions; he subtly steers the family ship while they flounder over the moral impasses of their lives. But the death of Samuel is more than that; it is a major turning point in the story. After the funeral, Adam builds up enough courage to confront Kate in person so he can leave her behind. The Hamilton family moves off the ranch, the children go to different cities, and they begin to grow apart. The lives of the Hamilton family members begin to recede and the lives of the Trasks become more dominant. After the poor inventor Samuel dies, the horse carts gets replaced by cars and the technological gadgetry of the modern era begin to appear. The psychological shock waves of World War I begin to affect the community.

     In some ways, the Hamiltons begin to interfere with the narrative in the third and forth sections of the book. Their stories seem to be arbitrarily inserted without adding anything significant. The story of Tom and Dessie’s deaths is interesting on its own but does not fit into the larger picture in any meaningful way. By the end of the novel, the Hamiltons are not even mentioned at all except in Lee’s brief references to the memory of Samuel. It is as if they just disappeared from Earth without a trace. The writing has a couple other problems too. Samuel’s speech is often interesting but sometimes it gets so overblown it starts to sound pretentious. Steinbeck’s sentences are sloppy too. He repeats words and ideas in a way that reminds the reader of someone who stutters when they speak. The sentimental and episodic nature of the storytelling make it read like a soap opera on occasion. And the end? Steinbeck never really ends his stories; it is more like he simply and abruptly stops writing and East of Eden is not an exception. But the prose has more successes than flaws; in the end if it works it works. The characters and landscapes are vivid and once they have been described they can never be forgotten.

     Finally, the reader can do a disservice to themselves by trying to find too many parallels between East of Eden and the biblical story of Cain and Abel that inspired it. This is not a retelling of that story; in the same way that James Joyce based Ulysses on The Odyssey of Homer, Cain and Abel are a point of departure. It is not a novel of spiritual transcendence but rather a novel of modern secular imminence. God plays only a marginal role in this book. The pendulum swings between the ancient fable and the existential dilemmas of humans trying to make sense of themselves and the world they live in with choice in the face of chronic uncertainty as their most powerful tool. In the end we are left to wonder about the sparsely detailed biblical story; what if Cain was not evil? What if he was a confused teenager searching for love in a bewildering world and mistakenly murdered Abel because he did not fully understand how to make effective choices? Have westerners had it wrong all along? Is it time to re-evaluate the old myths and find a new way to understand the world we live in? Probably but who really knows for sure.

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. Penguin Books, New York: 2002.