Advertising is the soul of Eden
Giving in and admitting I was wrong about something is not nearly as difficult as it might seem to those who only know me superficially or through my scribblings. But when the subject is the United States of America, the mere prospect of admitting, or even accepting, that they are good at anything sends shivers down my spine.
One of the old sayings in my home country that has always stuck with me is "advertising is the soul of business". Advertising is also the United States' greatest weapon. And by God, are they effective at this shit.
John Steinbeck is the kind of author I would have liked just from reading his biography, at least until his later years when those old ideas were no longer put together quite so virtuously. From the privilege of an American middle-class life, Steinbeck became a loudspeaker for the uprooted, the less fortunate, and those forgotten by the meat grinder of capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Many years ago, I read Of Mice and Men and was not much of a fan. Most likely, I simply was not ready for it. Nor was I helped by my attempts to get into speed-reading through increasingly elaborate methods before making the leap across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Grapes of Wrath had always been on my radar, mostly because other people kept recommending it. But I only truly popped my Steinbeck cherry with East of Eden. It was not a particularly deliberate choice, but it turned out to be a very good one.
It is a story that begins in classic fashion, with a fairly monotonous description of the land setting in which it will unfold over the following decades. Then, quite suddenly, something clicks and the book reveals what it has really come to do: "Americana" propaganda in the most substantive sense imaginable.
It is the long story of two families whose paths cross again and again, each carrying its own personal and collective tragedies. From an Irish immigrant who tries his hand at everything but never obtains the resources his intelligence and effort supposedly "deserved", to the descendant of Chinese immigrants who, toward the end of his life, finds himself becoming increasingly Western.
The prose is simply magnificent and consistent from beginning to end. There are no real moments to catch your breath, even when the lives of the Hamiltons and the Trasks enter one of their rare stretches of calm. Life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was hard, after all, even if opportunities always seemed to be waiting just around the corner for anyone willing to look for them and who had the hands and legs to seize them.
At this point, I thought about trying to discuss my relationship with each of the story's main characters and how each one affected me. But I feel that doing so would not do justice to just how genuinely memorable this reading experience was. Once again, I have to admit that my toughness is often little more than a shell. It is remarkable what a book assigned to high school students in the United States can do to an old fool like me.
Especially because even though this is a story full of archetypes, both good and bad, it is possible to see a little of yourself in every person in it. Of course many of them are also direct reflections of biblical characters, and even the book's cover announces that the story is, in part, a long examination of whether a person's final balance with the world and with the people who passed through their life ends up positive or not.
So it is difficult to squeeze such a rich story into a little box of text like this one. I would much rather recommend that anyone who, for whatever reason, missed the chance to read a book like this should do so whenever they can. It may very well be that I am simply getting carried away after encountering, perhaps for the first time and certainly for the first time with proper attention, an author who is at least reasonably good at what he does. But that is probably just me dismissing my own feelings toward a work of art that moved me far more deeply than I expected.