I bet you thought I was gone for good...

While I will admit that it's somewhat embarrassing to take four months to finish a book (The Grapes of Wrath), that in no way diminished the pride I felt the day after I turned the four hundredth and sixty something page and realized I'd reached the end. Since I started Grapes, I quit my job, moved 1000 miles, went (and still am going) through a break-up, and am working in a new field of interest, so it's been quite a tumultuous road. Needless to say, I haven't been reading every night and, for awhile there, I had to force myself to power through.
That said, the book is very well written (obviously, it's Steinbeck) and I was amazed at Steinbeck's ability to craft words in ways that, until now, I hadn't thought possible. I wish I could sit down and write something coherent about the book, but given that I read it over such a long period of time, I really don't think I can do it justice. Aside from the beautifully crafted prose and chapters of descriptive narrative, I thought that the most astonishing part was the end. It was sudden, and contradictory to what I felt the story arch should be, and yet now I look back and think that if I had been in Steinbeck's position, I don't know if I would've written the story to a conclusion either.

The vast number of migrant workers that moved from the Midwest to California during the Dust Bowl didn't become the prosperous, independent business owners they had dreamt they would be. The sudden influx of labor created an enormous surplus in a market that had, at one point, needed workers, but now had more than they knew what to do with. Wages plummetted below the standard of living and suddenly the people that had transplanted themselves in hopes of starting life anew found they were in a position much worse than before. Families broke apart in the face of unanticipated stressors: prejudice, threats of communism, police brutality, to name a few.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am starting to see why Steinbeck didn't finish out each character's trajectory. Yes, he could've written about how the family serendipitously encountered food, found work, and managed to survive, but his aim wasn't to write an uplifting novel describing an outcome that happened only for the very few. Steinbeck obviously wanted to write about what really happened. For the most part, these people were forcibly removed from the land where they had been for generations and transplanted to another part of the country where they faced the harsh reality of what had always been their situation. Yes, they had always been on the brink of poverty, but the closeness of their family and the simplicity of their lives had obscured that fact from view. With the elimination of their property, they became a transient working class with no skills other than manual labor at their disposal. Most of them became unemployed and with no work, there was no money; with no money, there was no food; with no food, most wouldn't like to extrapolate outward.

Sure, Steinbeck leaves the end up to the reader's imagination, but manipulating the story to a positive end would involve some sort of deus ex machina vehicle that is so clearly unrealistic that the end is effectively written without writing. It's striking in so many ways, it really leaves you sitting there with a hollow feeling about the whole thing. While I could wish the ending was different for the Joad family, it just, well, isn't.

Moving on, I'm getting back on the reading/writing horse. Next up is Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Goal is to finish it before it is in theaters (December 25). I'm actually quite excited for the movie version because it's gotten a significant amount of buzz, it is no doubt going to be Kate Winslet's sixth Oscar nomination, and the director has a fair amount of experience adapting written work to film (American Beauty).