East of Eden

⚖The case for it

Timshel. Thou mayest. A household servant works through the Hebrew with a circle of scholars and quietly hands the book its whole argument about free will; one reader's entire review of the idea reads "timshel, b*tch." The people carry the frame: Cal clawing for a father's approval, Samuel Hamilton lifted from Steinbeck's own family, and Cathy, of whom a reader admits no villain ever left them "so deeply shaken." The Salinas Valley opening runs pages of land before a person appears and wins over the skeptics anyway: "I could almost feel the sizzling California sun on my face." "John Steinbeck at his sharpest," says another, and the book pays on rhythm, a scene every fifty pages that compresses a relationship into one small gesture.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"Ponderous, pretentious, melodramatic, self-satisfied, patronizing to its readers." The women get two settings, "one evil and exaggerated to the point of absurdity" or plot service; "the men are various superlatives (greatest, kindest, wisest)" rather than people shown earning any of it. Lee delivers seminar lectures nobody onstage finds unusual, in "stilted and unnatural dialogue, which in no way resembles conversation." A second family, the Hamiltons, wanders in and out without serving the theme, the narrator slides between omniscience and a sudden first-person I, and the fatigue sets in on schedule around the two-thirds mark of seven hundred pages. The valley is gorgeous. The sermon never ends.

— the honest librarian

12h

honest hours

17

sittings