Book Review: Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Grapes of Wrath somehow managed to be utterly heartbreaking and rather dull at the same time. And you know it tears at my heart to say anything bad about John Steinbeck, because I was thinking he was a strong contender to becoming my favorite writer (still is, to be fair) because I loved East of Eden and Of Mice and Men so much. Come to find out his most famous book was a dud for me.

But the novel also reminded me of a part of history I had forgotten about. The novel describes the farmer migration (specifically the “Okie migration” of farmers from Oklahoma to California) during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Of course we all learned about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in school, and maybe we remember one of the biggest migrations in U.S. history that resulted from it, but I had never thought about the personal experiences of the migrants and what happened to them afterwards. I had just basically diminished the experience to “oh, a bunch of people were forced to move,” and this novel made me a whole lot more sympathetic for the displaced people forced into nomadic poverty and who couldn’t find a home.

The chapters of the novel alternated between the story of the Joad family and a narrator describing the higher level experience of all the migrants. I thought that the interchapters helped place the novel in the relevant setting and offered some poignant descriptions, but I could also see how they could get a bit overhanded since it was less subtle messaging than the more fictionalized Joad narrative. Perhaps that is why I didn’t enjoy this novel as much as his others, because it did seem as though Steinbeck was more interested in delivering a message or an agenda than a story.

I didn’t mind the characters and they were pretty well developed, but I also wasn’t crazy about any of them. I appreciated each of them and the varying value they brought to the story, but I never got super attached. I did dread the idea of them breaking apart, as was often threatened, since the family was strongest together.

The ending, though, is very touching and impactful. I put down the book with a “wow.” It’s a very unexpected ending and it didn’t wrap up the story of the Joads in a particularly satisfying “happy ever after” way, but I think a more typically satisfying ending would have done the book a disservice. The ending chapters were some of my favorites of the novel and were truly heartrending. If the whole book was as unexpected but as subtly rendered, less preachy, and perhaps more condensed, the book maybe could have been as emotional and awe-inspiring as East of Eden.