Tortilla Flat

I can remember being puzzled by this book the first time I read it years ago. I came to it expecting Cannery Row and was disappointed that it wasn't. I had the same expectation this time around, even though I knew better, and I was disappointed all over again. I kept expecting to like Danny and the Paisanos like Mac and boys, but I just couldn't feel a whole lot for them. They may have intended good, but their lack of perspective, the "moral" shortcomings kept torpedoing those good intentions. They were just fooling themselves.

Maybe part of the problem was trying to listen to the book when I was already tired and driving down to Durango late. The more that I drove, the sleepier that I got, and the more disjointed that the story felt. When I eventually turned the story off, I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue.

But I persisted in listening to the second half of the book, and that made all the difference. No, it still wasn't Cannery Row--very few things are--but the book seemed to pick up with Danny's gift of the vacuum cleaner to Sweets and take on a new comic richness that I found lacking before. The electric vacuum cleaner raised Sweet's status in the community which had no electricity. She ran it over the floor of her house making a humming sound, and that was OK since it turned out that the vacuum cleaner had no motor in it anyway.

That led to the episode where Big Joe Portagee stole the money that the Pirate had been saving to buy a candle for Saint Francis. The money had become a central trust between the boys, and the violation of the trust was met with a vengeance and a brutality that was shocking, but also totally in character for the paisanos. The money was restored, the sacred trust was reestablished, Big Joe Portagee was readmitted into the society, and the Pirate bought the candle. The scenes where the dogs burst into the church to find the Pirate, and then his preaching to them in the woods, were some of the funniest and most touching scenes in the book. That led to the boys going on a crime spree to feed the children of Teresina Cortez, also central to the book. Critics have made a lot of the ironic parallels with Arthurian legends, and these chapters certainly best best represent the comparisons, although, in all honesty, I didn't feel it at the time.

The final scenes, with Danny going berserk and trying to regain his freedom, and then the boys trying to restore Danny's health with a party, leading to the final confrontation with the Beast outside the door, reminded me a lot of Mac and the boys trying to throw a party for Doc. It's as if Danny and the paisanos  morphed into Mac and the boys, with the same wry humor in describing their ways of thinking, justifying their own short term wants with ironic turns of logic and self-deception. Certainly what Doc said about the boys, that they were the true philosophers, applies to the paisanos, but somehow they don't seem quite as agreeable as the boys.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1935

Length: 7 hr 03 min

Narrator: McDonough, John

Sweet Thursday

It's funny. When I first read Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday years ago, I preferred Sweet Thursday, but now, on re-reading, I don't think that it is nearly the book that Cannery Row is. Perhaps it has to do with the plot. Cannery Row didn't have much of a plot and so it could lapse into lyrical passages and descriptive asides as the need arose. It felt timeless. Sweet Thursday relies much more on the plot--the coming together of Susie and Doc, and also relies a lot more on dialog. It's just not quite as subtle, I guess. And the humor feels a little more strained, a little more forced. None of this is to say that Sweet Thursday isn't an enjoyable read--Steinbeck far outshines any of the other authors that I've read in the past few years except maybe for Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls--but it didn't seem to hold up as well as Cannery Row in this re-visit.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1954

Length: 8 hr 59 min

Narrator: Farden, Jerry

Cannery Row

This was my second "reading" of the book and reminded me yet again that Steinbeck is the great American novelist. While the plot isn't much, Steinbeck's descriptions always blow me away. The opening line really says it all: "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." It is a poem written in prose, a celebration of a time and a place, even with all the rough edges of homelessness, poverty, drunkenness.

Mack and the boys living at the Palace Flophouse provide whatever plot there is to the story, of course, with their scheming and planning for the two parties, which inevitably go bad. As Mack says, "Ever'thing I done turned sour...If I done a good thing, it got poisoned up some way." And that's as close to pathos or pity as the book really comes, even though most of the characters are really down and out, living on the edge of destitution. At the same time, Doc somewhat envies Mack and the boys "There are your true philosophers...Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen...In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed."

And this appreciation of the down and out characters of Cannery Row, from the whores of Dora's Bear Flag Restaurant to the artist Henri and even Lee Chong underlies the poem that is Cannery Row. Steinbeck fits in short descriptive chapters, like the sailors leaving the bar and dawn or Mary Talbot's discovery of Kitty Cassini killing the mouse or the dog eating the entrails thrown out by doctor who had embalmed the writer Josh Billings. It's written with humor and a tenderness that bring out the nostalgia and the dream. Parts of it are laugh out loud funny. Parts of it are just sheer beauty and wonder.

And then the old Chinaman with the loose sole on his shoe flip flapped up the street every evening and every morning in the eternal round of the day, so that the story plays out as a small vignette against the ongoing tide of sea and humanity. (and wouldn't Steinbeck be appalled by what they have made of Cannery Row with it's tourist shops and restaurants, now?) No wonder Cannery Row is one of my all time favorite novels.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1945

Length: 6 hr 1 min

Narrator: Farden, Jerry