The Gentle Folks Back Home

This is one of those family saga novels, the kind that well-up in authors every so often and cannot be repressed. John Steinbeck in this book traces his forebears through 602 pages and, being a skillful novelist, does it well, but in the end the reader wonders "Was it worth all the effort?" The answer here is no.

In comparison to Steinbeck's earlier novels, "East of Eden" has greater variation in mood and less singleness of theme. Because of the loose construction, one does not fell the direct impact found in such a work as "The Grapes of Wrath."

It is not that Mr. Steinbeck's relatives are not interesting people. On the contrary, they are the sort usually described as "tempestuous" and include a self-educated noble farmer, two pairs of moody brothers, and a monster. They are all interesting people, probably drawn from life, but one gets the feeling that in his drawings Mr. Steinbeck has exaggerated some lines until the characters themselves have become weird and unbelieveable.

Take for example the patriarchial hero of "East of Eden," Samuel Hamilton. Talented as a blacksmith and inventor, Samuel also "had no equal for soothing hysteria and bringing quiet to a frightened child. It was the sweetness of his tongue and the tenderness of his soul."

That's the main trouble with Samuel; he's too good, too talented, too consistently right. And oh God, the sweetness of his tongue! It's cloying. For pages and pages he talks on in this manner: "You know I've been so close to the details I've paid no attention to the clothing of the day. First we find a buried star and now we go to dig up a mint-new human." And later on he says "The sweetness of your offer is a good smell on the west wind."

Now the author explains that Sam Hamilton is Irish, but even poetic Irishmen must sometimes break down into plain, unmetered English. The fact is that even not being Irish does not save some of the other characters from this same precisely-accented. false speech. Lee, the Chinese servant, would be an appealing person if he spoke just plain excellent English, instead of Mr. Steinbeck's pretty sentences.

Unbelievable, but through a different cause, is the monster, Cathy Ames. There are, Mr. Steinbeck believes, moral monsters just as there are physically misshapen ones, and Cathy is one of these. She starts, as a young girl, by burning down her home (with her mother and father in it), and ends up owning a whorehouse dedicated to the more violent perversions, abandoning a husband and a brace of twins along the way. Never having met so fiercely evil a person, the reader will have to rely on the author's word, and that at times is insufficient.

Despite its pretentiousness, the book has some completely charming parts. Lee's tale of how he engaged four learned old Chinese sages to learn Hebrew in order to translate a crucial verb in the Bible is one of them, as is the story of how Sam Hamilton's wife took her first plane ride. The flight was doubly terrifying because the airplane was something she essentially did not believe in.

There are many other scenes in this long novel in which two characters get to do or say some original, amusing, or lovely things. It is a pity however, that these sections are locked in the heavy form of a family history.