Steinbeck and Tolstoy

It's the summer session on campus which affords me more time to read and do things other than academics. I decided to pick up Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a true American classic and one of those quintessential American books which forms a fundamentally important pillar in the edifice of American literature. I had high hopes from the book but it ended up disappointing me and finishing it became a real slog. The story charts the fictional (but inspired by history) journey of the Joad family as they move from Sallisaw Oklahoma to California in search of jobs in the era of the great depression. The farms out in middle America have been consolidated and taken over by large conglomerates, the legendary dust storms of the mighty American planes are in full swing, and individual farmers who own small parcels of land find themselves unable to produce enough to feed their families. In this context, the Joads decide to embark upon the slow and torturous journey over the mother road (route 66) which continually chips away at their fortunes and family. By the time the book ends, one gets this uneasy feeling that the Joads might have been better staying and, if needed, dying out in Sallisaw. Their story, being representative of many real human beings at a desperate time in America, is deeply poignant - as a reminder of the cruelty and impersonability of the American capitalist machinery in times of great nationwide catastrophes. However, the story also left me feeling that Steinbeck was trying to use the cheap tricks of melodrama to pull at my heartstrings. The sorrows and travails of the Joad family are told in great detail from first person perspectives and there appears to be no end to the pain and suffering that the members of the family are subjected to and yet, through it all, the Joads do not appear to have developed any sophisticated inner monologue and no great and consistent life insights. Many many things happen to the Joads and they take it all in their stride. Courage, in the absence of inner struggles, cheapens suffering and that's what Steinbeck managed to do with his characters in this book. It is also frustrating that Steinbeck chose to render most of the dialogue in a kind of dialect which might have been spoken by the members of a certain socioeconomic class at the time. This makes it difficult to sustain any flow while reading the book as one has to constantly stop oneself and wonder about the need for the word "fambly" when a simple "family" would have done. I also do not buy that people spoke like this since almost everyone that the Joads meet on their journey seems to speak in the same idiotic English no matter which part of the country they come from. I think this dialectical choice was arrogant and idiotic - it appears to be the kind of language and tone that a highly educated, upper middle class intellectual from California might think is used by lower class farmers across middle America.

I think The Grapes of Wrath is more or less garbage because it is needlessly difficult to read, it is far too melodramatic, and it lacks any deep insight and narration to accompany the stories of what are essentially caricatures of archetypes and not real human beings. Which is why Tolstoy's Resurrection, which I am reading now, comes as such a breath of fresh air. Although the Resurrection is not considered the greatest work of Tolstoy (that would be Anna Karenina), the book shows what a genius can do to stories which deal with pain and sorrow. The Russians were absolute masters of stories about humans beings captured in the insidious whirlpools of bureaucracies, religions, and inner turmoil and they tell those stories with a great deal of humor. The humor is subtle and submissive in nature - it's akin to the laughter that is left when no more struggles would be useful. It is also the laughter that one can aim at the various factions of society which take themselves too seriously. In the Resurrection, it is aimed at lawyers, and judges, and nobility, and religion but the same might nowadays be directed at silicon valley types, wall street types, or even professors.