A review by lite_academic
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
To say that East of Eden is the worst book I’ve even had the misfortune to pick up would be a huge understatement. I truly despise this book! It may be my first hard DNF in a very long time. This book had such a profound negative impact on me that it took me down the road to a reading slump, a journaling slump, and caused me to sour on a Patreon book club I was genuinely excited about being a part of. I have no words for how truly heinous this work is or for how nasty it made me feel. 

I thought maybe I could finish it by hate reading my way through it. I even tried the audiobook version. Nope! No can do! I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a work of fiction that so deeply hates me for what I am—a woman. 

East of Eden is mildly entertaining in a way that a soap opera, no matter how bad, is entertaining. In many ways, I have far fewer impressions of East of Eden than I do about its author. I don’t know if I have ever read a work by an author whom I would come to regard as irreparably broken in a way that repulses me. Is this leprosy of the soul contagious? Can I catch it if I read one more page? Can his brokenness and his inner poverty reach for me from beyond the grave and, like some contagion, turn me into a soul-cripple? Make me become incapable of empathizing with or of picturing a unique inner world within any human being who is unlike myself? Can I be blunter? I think I can! Margaret Mitchell did a better job writing African American characters than Steinbeck does writing women and people of color—the bar is in literal Hell! 

To excuse Steinbeck’s rampant racism, sexism and his inability to see even a shred of humanity in anyone who is not a straight white male, is to engage in an act of willful amnesia. A turbulent marriage does not excuse him. In some ways, his personal history makes this book so, so much worse. What are we to make of a book written by a father and dedicated to his sons where the main (and I suspect only) villain is a parenticidal young woman who, as a side-hustle, prostitutes herself for fun since before puberty and whose motives are nothing more than to be evil for evil’s sake? Oh, and how can we forget, this young woman is based . . . ON THE MOTHER OF STEINBECK’S TWO SONS! As Aveline so aptly put it in Dragon Age II, some people are just born broken. Steinbeck clearly agreed with that wisdom (see below). Now, if only someone had given him a mirror . . . 

Oh, I know, I know, those were “different times.” That appears to be the excuse most often repeated on behalf of Steinbeck. I’m sorry, but that is not and cannot be good enough. 

In 1812, Leo Tolstoy finished War and Peace. 

In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper completed The Last of the Mohicans. 

In 1831, Victor Hugo gifted the world The Hunchback of Norte-Dame. 

None of these examples are perfect. None of these men were unproblematic. However, their portrayals of women, persons of color, and persons with disabilities are nuanced. Are these works still tinged with prejudice? Yes! However, there is an effort to be kind, to be compassionate, and to present complex characters with turbulent inner worlds. Where these works and the men who authored them fall short, they genuinely deserve the concession of “they were a product of their times.” Does Steinbeck? I think you know what my answer will be. 

In 1952, over 100 years after my last example, Steinbeck vomited up East of Eden. 

Here are some “gems” from Part 1: 

“First there were Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers, and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish.” 

“While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents.” 

[After Adam Trask’s first wife catches gonorrhea from him, she commits suicide. THIS is how that’s described.] “And then, dressed in a secretly made shroud, she went out on a moonlight night and drowned herself in a pond so shallow that she had to get down on her knees in the mud and hold her head under water. . . . [S]he was thinking with some irritation of how her white lawn shroud would have mud down the front when they pulled her out in the morning. And it did.” 

“He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money – unless you were married to it.” 

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought.” 

Then there’s the excuse that East of Eden is meant to be allegorical. Sure! Does that make it good? No! There are plenty of allegorical works that are thoughtful and well-written. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies comes to mind. Not only is it an allegorical novel heavily steeped in Roman-Catholic symbolism, but it is also a biting criticism of rural Canada at the turn of the 20th century and of the prosperity gospel that began to emerge in the 1920s. It is, by far, my favorite allegorical work from the 20th century. Many others are near and dear to my heart. Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann – I have been very lucky to have high school and university instructors who did an amazing job with helping us make sense of these novels. I’ve sought out a few on my own too. That’s how I’ve found His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. I’m sure there were others, but these two stick out to me at the moment. What I can say for certain is that East of Eden isn’t just on this list of modern allegorical works I cherish—it’s not getting near the list. 

I got a couple of chapters into Part II of East of Eden and had to stop after the sanctimonious description of how right and good it is to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. I live in the United States, which means that for the past year I had to live in the aftermath of Supreme Court’s Decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. While I and my loved ones have not been personally impacted, many women and many families have been, and my heart breaks for them. I was on a plane traveling for work when I tried getting past these chapters in East of Eden, and at some point I had to decide that I simply could not continue. I turned off the audiobook and I have not revisited it or the hard copy I bought for the book club. Sometimes, it’s okay to quit. 
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