as someone who loved grapes of wrath and will defend avidly its place amongst the greatest of american novels, east of eden was an (amusing) disappointment.
steinbeck is, on a technical level, not the most deft of writers--he strikes with a hot and heavy hand, and at times his intentions lay too close to the surface. we witness this in wrath with clumsy foreshadowing ("i just have a feeling something is going to happen to casy!"), interspersed "rant" chapters, and the tedious descriptions of How Men Fix Cars. the difference, however, was that in grapes of wrath all this clumsiness served to tell a story that was remarkable, profound, and more than that-- the story not just of human suffering, which so many contemporary novels fixate on--of pain, of victimhood, of grievance and of oppression--but of human struggle and human resilience. it faced an enormous question--how did a generation of americans survive the dust bowl?--and answered: together. it brimmed with belief--in the collective, in the resilience of (what steinbeck would never be so crass as to call) the proletariat, in the dogged and incontrovertible fact that are each other's greatest hope for survival.
You made me realize what I didn't like about this book.. I could never take it seriously, throughout the whole thing. It felt weirdly lighthearted, partially from how caricaturish everyone was.