Cannery Row
author: John Steinbeck
name: Paul
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2012/06/26
date added: 2012/06/26
shelves: classic, novel
review:
There’s a point I reached in my reading of Cannery Row where I flipped to the back and noted the tightly-margined pages only counted 120 or so, and it made me sad. John Steinbeck‘s tale of a place and time, filtered through the experiences of a cast of people in a meandering, semi-linear narrative snapshot is one that I wished would go on a bit further. I suppose the beauty of Cannery Row could be in the way it doesn’t wear out its welcome, but it was so descriptive and transportive that I found myself lingering on it, taking longer to read each page than even my usual slow reading requires so I could stay in the Row.
It’s possible that part of my affection for the novel is that I live in Northern California, close enough to Monterey that I can visit in a day and still return home. I’ve vacationed there several times for longer stretches; I genuinely love the area, and did so before reading Steinbeck’s book. Reading Cannery Row then is like seeing a well-made documentary about your hometown or discovering an old diary from a favored relative. I don’t know exactly how realistic Steinbeck’s depiction of Cannery Row during the Depression is, but I find that I like to believe that his portrayal of the area is at least spiritually accurate.
I suppose it can’t be possible for it to be completely grounded in truth; Steinbeck’s obvious fondness for vagabonds and drunks and whores probably doesn’t mean that down-and-outers all have hearts of gold. Still, the world that is presented here, fantasy or not, is one that I completely fell in love with. Steinbeck’s ability to describe and conjure is startling. He doesn’t rely on literary gymnastics like Vladimir Nabokov, nor does he simplify to the point of relying on mere suggestion like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. Instead, Steinbeck achieves a kind of homespun poetry that lacks pretension but is, in its own rootsy way, very stunning. It’s also funny, which was something I didn’t expect.
Take, for example, this description from Chapter 30:
“The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.”
There isn’t much of a plot to Cannery Row, the loose connection of vignettes regularly returns to the band of hobos who live in The Palace Flophouse, led by Mack, who try throughout to do something nice for the neighborhood benefactor (of sorts), Doc, who runs the marine biology lab on the Row. Throughout, Steinbeck weaves shorts about the couple who move into the abandoned industrial boiler, Lee Chong who runs the local grocery and operates almost exclusively on credit, madam Dora Flood and her prostitutes at the Bear Flag Restaurant, and other less frequently appearing characters who all serve to give Cannery Row its distinct, homesick-inducing personality.
By now I suppose it’s redundant to say I really loved this book, but I think any work that gave me a new appreciation for a place I already thought had a certain charm, that made me want to visit again right away, that made me laugh and that simply made me happy that I could step into its world even for a short time is one that deserves to be called out as not just good, but especially remarkable.