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A review by savaging
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
4.0
"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise -- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream -- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book -- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves."
A book of "no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums." Which means I can trust Steinbeck. The lumpen-proles and a love-lorn gopher and the oozing flatworms. "In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else."
Sometimes the tone feels a little too folksy and uplifting. But right then something irredeemably tragic peeks in to remind me this isn't Norman Rockwell, nor a Taoist guide to finding inner peace, and though we can love all the weeds and unwanted in this place, no one's pretending to have answered anything.
A book of "no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums." Which means I can trust Steinbeck. The lumpen-proles and a love-lorn gopher and the oozing flatworms. "In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else."
Sometimes the tone feels a little too folksy and uplifting. But right then something irredeemably tragic peeks in to remind me this isn't Norman Rockwell, nor a Taoist guide to finding inner peace, and though we can love all the weeds and unwanted in this place, no one's pretending to have answered anything.