Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Title: Cannery Row
Author: John Steinbeck
Published: 1945
Type: Fiction
Pages: 181
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.
In Brief:
I liked this book a lot more than I expected. Steinbeck’s language is undeniably masterful and the book as a portrait of its people/setting is lovely.
Rating: 4.2
Synopsis:
Cannery Row is a book that, for the most part, lacks a plot. If I had to give it a storyline, it’s about a group of men referred to as “Mack and the boys” who decide to throw a party for a friend, a marine biologist called Doc. This is no easy task; the men, like all those who live on Cannery Row, are far down the economic ladder, unemployed and living in a converted fish-meal storage shack. To make money for party supplies, they “borrow” a truck and go off to catch frogs, which naturally later escape. They bake a cake, but their puppy eats most of it. When the time comes for the party, they throw it at Doc’s house while he’s on a trip, but it’s over before he returns and they utterly destroy his laboratory. They feel bad for a time and the whole town darkens, but Doc heals Mack and the boys’ dog, and they make up. The men throw him another party, which is a roaring success. The book ends with Doc cleaning up and reflecting on his life.
But that’s not really what the book is about. Nearly every other chapter digresses to tell the tale of another character in Cannery Row, which are largely unrelated and unresolved. There’s Dora, the madam of the local brothel who paid the bills for many others during the Depression and donates generously to local charities. There’s Henri, an artist who pretends to be French and builds a boat he never intends to finish because he’s afraid of the ocean. There’s Lee Chong, the shrewd but generous Chinese grocer. And on and on.
Ultimately, the book is a portrait. It captures the feeling and the people of the place, Cannery Row. Steinbeck once explained that he wrote the book for soldiers who asked him to write something funny, something to distract them from the war. To that end, the book acts as a portal, something that might allow soldiers to escape into another place altogether – and it still does, 75 years later.
Where I’m At:
I read this book in late January/early February, before coronavirus and the quarantine. Not to be melodramatic, but it feels like years ago. A whole different lifetime, when I could just rent a car with some friends, go on a weekend trip and not worry about a thing.
Which is what happened. Twice! Ashan and I drove down to Paso Robles for a weekend in January, where we popped between wineries and visited my friend Laura. I was very happy that weekend, content. Seeing Laura was a little surreal – I’ve known her since we were five years old, and now we’re in very different places in life. She’s a teacher, owns a house with her fiancee, adopted a very large dog. But old friends are special, and none of that matters. It’s very easy to fall back into the familiar, simply knowing and loving one another.
I also read this book for my Book Club’s inaugural and long-anticipated “Book Club on Location,” where we went down to Cannery Row ourselves for our discussion. I was one of two drivers and was delighted when I found out my ride would be a Mini Cooper – it was honestly adorable.
We roamed the beach, taking silly pictures on the cliffs and drawing sundials in the sand. We visited the Monterey Bay aquarium, delighted by the jellyfish, octopus, albatross, and sea otters. We made beer milkshakes, a drink Doc orders in the book (Belching Beaver Peanut Butter Stout + vanilla ice cream – unsurprisingly delicious). We played games, hung out at the Airbnb we rented in Salinas, the heart of Steinbeck territory.
You know, basically all the things we can’t do anymore.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Getting Into it:
Again, I didn’t expect to like this book very much, and was pretty disappointed when we settled on it for Book Club. It wasn’t an objection to Steinbeck or Salinas – East of Eden is one of my all-time favorite books, and Monterey is gorgeous. Rather, I was concerned about the “book without a plot” aspect of the synopsis, since I usually find that sort of thing annoying.
I should have more faith in Steinbeck. He focuses on the characters, writing about them with such dedicated love and tenderness the reader can’t help but fall in love in turn. They’re nuanced, more complicated than they appear. Even the ones that only appear for a chapter become fleshed out with startling quickness and detail, their motivations, passions, and weakness immediately laid bare. There are a few lines that immediately sum up the character Mack:
“Hazel kicked sand on the fire. “I bet Mack could of been president of the US if he wanted,” he said.
“What could he do with it if he had it?” Jones asked. “There wouldn’t be no fun in that.”
Overall, there’s a wry love for humanity in Steinbeck’s characters that reminds me of Vonnegut, without the cynicism.
Beyond the characters, there’s this golden glow in which Steinbeck paints the place itself. It’s clear that Steinbeck loves the land of Salinas/Monterey. He spends long, indulgent paragraphs describing a morning scene, the exact rush of the waves over the tides. This is another habit that would grate me in a different author, too cheesy and overdone, but Steinbeck does it so gently and earnestly I’m caught up in the rhythm of the sentences:
“It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the water world becomes quiet and lovely, the sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, breeding animals.”
Lastly, I appreciated the book’s structure. The simplicity of the plot allowed the side stories to shine as well, weaving into the overall narrative without much distraction, enabling the reader to take a step back and understand the town as a whole. At the same time, the light, silly story of the party often stood in contrast with the alternate chapters, which showed the darker side of Cannery Row. They could be shockingly violent, either directly or indirectly: Doc finds a women’s dead body floating in a tide pool, the whorehouse’s watchman commits suicide, Henri has a vivid vision of a ghost decapitating a baby. There’s this balance of humor and deep sadness, joy and hardship, that Steinbeck manages masterfully in a way that’s technical as well as linguistic.
The only thing I can really complain about is the sometimes racist or misogynistic undertones of the book, which left a bad taste in my mouth. Lee Chong feels like an “Oriental” caricature, more of an othered figure, tended to with less of the affection Steinbeck bestows on other characters. Lee makes many generous acts, but they’re largely dismissed as being secretly selfishly motivated. Meanwhile, Mack and the boys threaten and steal from Lee, but are allowed to get away with it. As one of the town’s only somewhat-successful businessmen, he’s the embodiment of Steinbeck’s despised capitalism; I wouldn’t mind this so much if it wasn’t bound so much in racism.
The misogynism was mostly apparent in the lack of women in the story, other than as sexual partners. Mack and the boys are bachelors or have been left by their wives, which receives relatively little attention. One of the boys blatantly beats his wife, which is excused because she hits him while he’s asleep (color me skeptical). Dora is the only exception, but is desexualized as a “huge” woman with bright orange hair and colorful clothes, so she hardly seems to count.
(At least Steinbeck seems somewhat self-aware of this deficiency – one woman sobs to her husband: “Men just don’t understand how a woman feels. Men just never try to put themselves in a woman’s place.”)
Still – I liked the book. There’s a warm glow to Cannery Row. It drips with nostalgia, is tied up with charm and simplicity. And I definitely recommend a visit to Monterey, especially if you’re driving a Mini Coop.
