Well, it’s a long novel, so it gets a long review.

This was frequently cited in “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel“, so I decided to read it. It might be the last “classic” that I read, so I made a commitment to finish this one–the great American novel (along with The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird). But just because something’s old doesn’t mean it has value.

This book is about white people farming and suffering from time-sink fallacy–just because you spent a lot of time on something without making any progress doesn’t mean you should keep doing it. Like a video game where you just can’t make that jump. Here, it’s that the land is worth something to them. “Oh, I spent my blood, sweat, and tears on this land. I buried my brother over there. I dug my hands into it. Eight generations of my family lived here.” Well, now the land isn’t giving back.

Yeah, you may have invested a lot of time and money into your land, but now you’re not getting anything from it. Like keeping a car that doesn’t run and then getting angry when it’s repossessed. It’s the same reason people stay in dead relationships–you’re not getting anything from it, but moving out would be harder. Here, the farmers are using classic anger-and-denial defense mechanism, blaming the banks. Except you had a deal with the banks.

Once I wrote how I have no sympathy for the rich. This book gives me no sympathy for the poor. Half the book demonifies the businesses and banks ousting the poor farmers. But who sold you that land in the first place? It was their land in the first place. You basically got a small business loan. Then you have the guts to say “what do you mean I have to pay it back? I made no money this year, but it’s not my fault. No one bought my one-eyed cat statues. It’s not like I wasted it all on booze and bad investments.”

Well, sometimes you’re unlucky. That’s the risk you take in a job that depends on nature, a famously unpredictable mistress. Maybe a giant shipping boat gets stuck in the Suez Canal and your supplies don’t arrive on time. It’s possible to do nothing wrong, but you still have to pay the piper.

“Oh, the big bad banks are taking advantage of us. And so are these carpetbaggers. And car dealers. Woe is me, the shop paid only $15 for my precious child’s doll which has no intrinsic value to anyone but her. Everyone’s preying on me.” And then they steal and vandalize the shops because they’re desperate.

It sounds like I’m ragging on the oppressed and siding with big corporations, hypocritizing what I said before about the rich. Not so. I might sympathize with these people… if they weren’t so incompetent.

The Joads wait way too late to leave a bad situation. They drive to California with too many people, in a hacked-up car with no tires, going to a state they have no firm proof has their salvation, just a flyer with promises of a land of milk and honey. This is a novel about a bunch of rubes being fleeced. They act like turkeys staring up at the rain and wonder why they’re drowning. But that’s how capitalism works–it thrives on ignorance.

And then there’s other stuff the family does. Like they decide to bring their dog at the last minute (they actually have two dogs, but one doesn’t come so they leave it abandoned on the farm–that thing’s going to die). Then they stop at a gas station and let everyone out. The dog wanders by a highway and immediately gets run over and dies. No one notices it, no one calls for it. Pa’s response? “Guess I oughta tied him up.”

They say you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat their animals. And you could say “it was a different time, people treated animals differently back then, yadda yadda yadda.” My counter-argument is you could say that about any time–slavery, segregation, Indian reservations, sending the mentally disabled to sanitariums, fat-shaming. You could always say “that was just what you did back then”. Except if you take a close look, there are ALWAYS people who know better. There are always dissenters.

If you take the dog with you, you should take care of it. At least you could sell it if you’re low on money. Or eat it, if you’re really desperate. (Don’t get all eww on me–there’s an adult breastfeeding scene at the end of this book.)

Every chapter alternates between the story of the Joads and some essay/narrative around some aspect of this time period–farming, diners, traveling, jails. One chapter is themed around the old “man vs. machine” trope. “Horses are better than tractors because horses have a ‘living sense’, but a tractor is a cold dead thing.” John, are you saying farmers should prefer the implement that needs feeding, has half the longevity, one-quarter the power, parts that can’t be replaced, and dies from exhaustion if run straight for three hours? Get over yourself. No farmer, today or yesterday, would give up their implements for the old ox-and-plow.

A little about the main character: Tom Joad isn’t strong enough to be a main character. Even as a hub for other characters to revolve around. He doesn’t have anything to make me connect to him. He’s not one of the big five: sacrificing, principled, sympathetic, winsome, or smart.

The novel’s more of an ensemble piece. But even ensembles have a distinct main character. A Game of Thrones has hundreds, but the story revolves around Tyrion, Jon Snow, and Daenerys.

But Steinbeck doesn’t give Tom a strong enough presence to be a protagonist. What do I mean by that? I know what Tom Joad is meant to do, but I don’t know why. He’s meant to take Preacher Casy’s place (or Casy’s his mentor*) to become a leader for the people. To act as their voice, unite them, speak up for their rights. But why? We know he’s self-sacrificing, because he went to prison defending someone in a fight. But what does that have to do with becoming a union leader.

*By the way–fuck Preacher Casy. Steinbeck’s supposed to make me sympathetic toward a priest who raped a thirteen-year-old girl. And all that happened is he lost his job. I hope he’s burning in hell.

I’m not saying every book needs to have a likable character, but you don’t have to bore me with it. It seems like the trend in classic American literature is that everyone should be dumb stubborn assholes–The Old Man and the Sea, As I Lay Dying, Stranger in a Strangeland, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye. At some point, someone decided “Great literature is about deplorable people. I have spoken.”

And in the ending, we don’t even see Tom Joad step up and make the big change he’s been building toward. He just says what he’s thinking about doing and wanders into the grass, never to be seen again. And the story keeps going without him. We’re left with the supporting characters. "Sorry, that story doesn't usually go on for four hundred and fifty pages, but I got into a serious thing. And then I forgot how it ended."

Every time I opened this book I wondered “What am I supposed to get out of this. What am I supposed to learn? What is this supposed to teach me (as a writer)?”

Okay, there is one positive I can take away. Everything is so beautifully detailed. Every nuance. Every word is illustrative. Every tiny little facet of this time period is explored like a Beethoven symphony. To a fault. This would never fly with the short attention spans of today, and rightly so.

When I was writing my first novel, I got criticized for a scene where someone saves a turtle. It was motif-building and characterizing, but it didn’t have to do with the story. So when I read every detail about skinning a rabbit I have to ask “What does this have to do with the story? What does this add to the plot?”

So in the end, this book is an illustration of life in the dust bowl/depression years. But as entertainment or “this is what books should be”–no. I don’t know what place this has today, but it’s not for me.