Every now and then you read a work of art with such sweeping majesty in its narrative that it drowns you in its torrent; what emerges is the sense that you’ve been affected but you can only muster half-formed kernels of thought as explanation.
‘East of Eden’ stripped down is the story of two families; the Trasks and the Hamiltons as they settle in the Salinas valley near California towards the closing years of the 19th century. Focussing mostly on the Trasks, it traces the lives of the half-siblings, Adam and Charles, who are raised by their war-wounded father Cyrus and his docile wife, Alice; Cyrus’s archaic approach to masculinity drives a wedge between the siblings that alters their relationship. Adam marries Cathy and moves to the valley where he’s entrusted to raise his children, Caleb and Aron, with the paternal guidance of his maverick friend, Samuel Hamilton, and his Chinese-American househelp, Lee. Cathy does her own thing which I’d rather not divulge.
The story, inspired by Biblical narratives, particularly Cain and Abel, makes the parallel obvious in the names of both sets of the Trask siblings – each is a C and A (Charles-Adam, Caleb-Aron); both sets have character arcs that resemble the biblical story; both sets have different personalities that clash with their brother’s; both have a brother that resents the other despite a deep-rooted love and grievously wounds the other.
As the tides of time turn, change comes to Salinas – farming, electricity, war, automobiles; families grow and wither, life transmutes into death, relationships build and crumble; the Trasks and the Hamiltons undergo all that counts for life in a seeming blink.
“He looked up at the sky. ‘Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life – so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do.’”
The characters are preoccupied with what they accomplish in this sliver of time. The novel, then, asks whether we are doomed to our fates via our ancestry or if we’re magical enough to turn the tides of destiny. Can we overcome our inherent proclivity towards evil, doom, and condemnation or can we coexist with our capacity for goodness? Can we conquer the feeling that we are deeply flawed, sinful, and thus deserving of whatever punishment the Gods have predestined for us?
While the focus stays on the sets of siblings in the Trask household, it is Cathy who emerges as the star of this novel, driving most of the plot and transformation within the characters. While I’ve read a few essays defending Cathy as a complicated figure vying for agency, I hesitate to offer this leeway to a character who is fundamentally designed as a person with an absent conscience, incapable of remorse or repentance. The story makes her “monstrosity” clear on repeated occasions, for instance, the chapter that introduces her –
“And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?…
…It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or the lack of them, which drove her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted ,some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth…
…Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain…”
Yet what I loved was that there was no sob story to her. She is capable of deplorable acts and she goes through with them without being fueled by trauma or revenge. She is out to live her life at everyone’s expense and she has no reservations about this. One can argue what it means in Steinbeck’s psyche that nearly all the women in the novel exhibit a Madonna-whore complex but it was fun to read an evil character being evil because they wanted to.
The verdict on Cathy’s monstrosity tempers eventually but it seems that Steinbeck had doomed her to her darker instincts from the get go, and she wasn’t on his radar for a redemption story. Did she, could she have redeemed herself? I think the book would have suffered had she also had the same moral trajectory as the male characters.
Speaking of which, there are plenty of them (characters) to dissect but the story drills down to Adam Trask, Caleb Trask, and Lee for the most part. Adam is written to be so oblivious to the failings of others that he barely avoids coming across as an idiot. He’s a man driven by his conscience yet foolishly a slave to his heart. Caleb, Adam’s son, is preoccupied with seeing himself as sinful and teeters between sinking to his self-fulfilling prophecy of ruination and a chance to turn things around. He’s burdened by the weight of a soul far heavier than his shoulders can bear. And there’s Lee playing on stereotypes of what society demands of him from his appearance. Committed to performing the role of the pidgin speaking immigrant servant, Lee’s story highlights the challenge of assimilation in a place that is reluctant to accept you. He veers somewhat into another stereotype, of the Eastern man with wisdom to offer, but I loved his character.
This is a 700+ page book so please know that there’s so much I’m skipping in this condensed musing. I read this as a buddy read and we were constantly praising Steinbeck’s ability to draw interesting people that offered more than their initial impressions. There’s so much that sticks with you by the time you reach the end, especially the word ‘timshel’ which is a source of revelation to the characters in terms of their personal philosophy towards mankind. Loosely translated to ‘thou mayest’ (though it is said to have been a misheard and misused word by Steinbeck), timshel is what is ultimately offered as the lantern of hope in this spiritual tussle of doom and absolution.
This was my first Steinbeck novel and it lived up to the hype. Though I read it rather slowly (over 2 months) and didn’t read more than 20 pages per sitting, I was absorbed into the world of the Salinas valley and the breadth of humanity that lived within it. Cathy emerged as a fascinating character whom I would use to draw a direct line to Amy Dunne in ‘Gone Girl’. Though Steinbeck’s book devoted itself to notions of good and its power to prevail, I find it ironic that it’s the pathologically evil character that emerged as the breakout entity.
Steinbeck has written a story where contradictions coexist. So shall this one. Should you read ‘East of Eden’?
Thou mayest.
SOME EXCELLENT QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
“When a child first catches adults out – when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just – his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck.”
“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
“There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.”
“The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.”
“He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn’t discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father’s books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow.”
“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.”
“Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life – so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do.”
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”
“And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”
“I eat stories like grapes.”
