Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck
If Catcher in the Rye ate my soul, Cannery Row punched both Holden and Sallinger in the face, reached in their stomachs and gave it back. I read the first paragraph and was hooked instantly. It was poetic; it was perfect. Steinbeck, who grew up in Northern California, describes a small town in Northern California, and although this is a work of fiction you can’t help but wonder where the fiction stops and the truth starts.
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.
Cannery Row is a different style of book than what I have been reading. Steinbeck is more focused on the surroundings and scene than he is on the actions of a particular character. Once he sets up a particular time and place, he allows the story to slowly creep in on it’s own. So, there isn’t much of a plot in this novel. If there is one, it’s mainly about how Doc is a standout guy, and because of that, Mack and the boys (the bums of the Palace Flophouse that swindle with good intentions) throw him two parties, both with similar outcomes, but one was a failure and the other a success.
Each character is interesting, and the adventures/events that lead up to the two parties are captivating and sometimes moving. Between the frog massacre, the Place Flophouse, the Bear Club whores, and the guy named Gay, this novel is a must read.
If there is anything that I will walk away from this book with, it is in the last page of the last chapter. It is the final section of a poem that Doc was reading at first to the party, and then to himself as he was cleaning the next day:
Even now,
I know that I have savored the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light
This is a great book, you should read it.
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