Nathanael73's Full Review: John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
After the great triumph of The Grapes Of Wrath, Steinbeck sought to deconstruct the novel. In 1939 he wrote a letter to a former college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, in which he declared, “I’ve worked the novel – I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it – a clumsy vehicle at best.” For Cannery Row, Steinbeck delved into the back-pages of his mind and brought to light a place and characters that he knew intimately. First published in 1945, Cannery Row is a semi-autobiographical work lacking a traditional narrative structure that describes in intimate detail the characters Steinbeck knew and loved in Monterey, California.
Cannery Row is more a collection of stories than a single story in itself. Each of the stories are connected in some way, and all are connected by their common locale. The novel does not have a beginning, middle, and end, in the traditional sense. Reading the book is like visiting a foreign country for a few weeks; one stays long enough to get to know the landscape and the locals, yet remains a foreigner. Steinbeck paints a vivid and detailed portrait of a unique place, specifically Ocean View Drive, in Monterey, California (since re-named Cannery Row due to the popularity of the book).
Cannery Row is populated with bums, prostitutes, Chinese, Poles, Greeks, soldiers, fisherman, factory-workers, cops and a marine biologist. The central characters are Doc, the marine biologist, Lee Chong, the grocer, Dora, the madam of the local brothel, and a group of bums who live in an old building known as the Palace Flophouse; Mack, Hazel, Jones, Eddie and Hughie. The characters form a tight-knit community in which residents help each other in times of need and celebrate together in times of joy.
As he did in The Grapes Of Wrath and Of Mice And Men, Steinbeck focuses on the fringe-dwellers, the disenfranchised, the outsiders. His characters live in a community outside of mainstream society and live by their own rules and customs. Steinbeck is not concerned with the canneries of Cannery Row or the people who work in the factory, but rather those who live around the factories in the grey light of dusk.
Cannery Row is a Darwinian world in which only the fittest survive. It is a world of suicide and loneliness, dreams and hope. In the first line of the book Steinbeck describes Cannery Row as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
Steinbeck was undoubtedly one of America’s greatest authors. Time and again he displays his gift for constructing brilliant sentences that leap off the page like spawning salmon. His eye for detail is simply stunning.
Readers familiar with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Kerouac’s On The Road will find similarities between those works and Steinbeck’s loving portrayal of the forgotten people of Cannery Row, those that Kerouac dubbed the “fellaheen.”
Though Cannery Row is a very experimental book in many ways, and challenges our ideas of what a novel is, it is extremely rewarding and pleasurable to read. Steinbeck creates a world so perfectly detailed that one is tempted to pack up and hit the road, bound for Monterey and the Palace Flophouse. He made the “beat” lifestyle appealing before Kerouac had even put pen to paper. Every reader with even the faintest interest in American literature and culture owes it to themselves to read Cannery Row.
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