Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In her introduction, Susan Shillinglaw shows how the novel expresses, both in style and theme, much that is essentially Steinbeck: “Scientific detachment, empathy toward the lonely and depressed . . . and, at the darkest level . . . the terror of isolation and nothingness.”

Why I Picked It Up

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Y'all know I've been absolutely loving my Steinbeck kick lately. Easily my favorite Great American writer, so I've been working my way through his canon this summer (coined my Steinbeck Summer.)

I'm at a precipice now where I can't decide if I want to save a few titles of his for a rainy day—when I feel I need a book to knock it out of the park—or to finish them, because there are other threads and rabbit holes I could go down.

Cannery Row, like The Red Pony or Of Mice and Men, is short. It functions largely as a novel of interconnected short stories and moments (which is a cinematic quality I loved from East of Eden too—there's enough life and good enough edges to each chapter that you feel each story or glimpse could exist wholly contained.)

About the Book

Cannery Row specifically is a bit goofy, following a Lost Boys-style group of boys ("men") around Monterey who can't quite seem to keep jobs, wives, or out of trouble. There's an expression among girls who live in transient or beachy towns like Honolulu, San Diego, and Charleston that often men in the dating pool have "Peter Pan syndrome" i.e. they never need to grow up, and the feel is similar.

But—and this is key in Cannery Row—that eternal youth leads to trouble and consequences frequently, but the intentions are good. The plot hinges on Mack and his boys wanting to throw a party for Doc, the solitary collector of sea animals who often drifts along the shores of California looking for ocean specimen, because they think he deserves it. Unfortunately, their attempts to reward Doc for his goodness often cause problems for him instead. (Having read the biography and seen Steinbeck's dedication to his friend Ed Ricketts, there's an easy parallel to draw here.)

The story also pulls in vignettes from Lee, the local grocer; Mary, a well-intentioned wife; Henri, a so-called painter who doesn't paint; and more. In all the universal rhythms of his work, Steinbeck is also so unfailingly creative in a way I never stop appreciating. It makes each of his stories and novels feel fresh. They can be funny, heartbreaking, or even a little strange, but they're also refined in an earthy way.

Lines I Loved

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

“ I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.”

“And everywhere people asked him why he was walking through the country. Because he loved true things, he tried to explain. He said he was nervous and besides he wanted to see the country, smell the ground and look at grass and birds and trees, to savor the country, and there was no other way to do it save on foot. And people didn't like him for telling the truth. They scowled, or shook and tapped their heads, they laughed as though they knew it was a lie and they appreciated a liar. And some, afraid for their daughters or pigs, told him to move on, to get going, just not to stop near their place if he knew what was good for him. And so he stopped telling the truth. He said he was doing it on a bet - that he stood to win a hundred dollars. Everyone liked him then and believed him.”

Similarly, I just read Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and that has an overlapping observation: that people are thrown off by honesty. They expect sincerity often to be hiding something, and some bare truth can often be disorienting in a way people decide not to like. The quote reflects Steinbeck's constant interrogation of performance vs. authenticity and what someone's "true" nature is.

“Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris.”

(Made me laugh in shock.)

“He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.”

“He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories.”

Overall Thoughts & Themes

Cannery Row is a good time which playfully incorporates many of Steinbeck's themes and curiosities, like whether good intentions matter if the outcome is negative or vice versa. What is actual morality? And then, as explained in his biography Mad at the World, he had a fascination with how group behavior grows out of control beyond the individuals who comprise it, and that's reflected in the packs and stories and antics that unfold in Monterey. You see the ripple effects whenever there is optimism or pessimism throughout the narrative, and that visibility itself was powerful.

I loved the book for its distinctive sensations and glimpses, like Doc trying to order a beer milkshake, or the boys being sneaky to get gas money, or how Darling the pup would sleep in the bed of whoever last bribed her.

“From the first she was a precocious bitch. She slept on the bed of the man who had given her the last bribe.”

The tenderness of Mary throwing parties for her cats, or the fascination with the skater up on his platform (which feels like a surreal image out of The Little Prince or some similar whimsical allegory.) Never in my life have I wanted to get drunk off corn whiskey and hunt frogs past midnight, but Steinbeck makes it sound like the best time in the world.

Cannery Row also has some gorgeous thoughts about shame. When it comes to forgiveness, the person they've wronged looks at the boys kindly and warmly still—but they're so busy punishing themselves for it that they wouldn't know it was all fine. Again, there's such a weight here to consider behind intention vs. what happens, and I feel like that's the signature thematic flair of this particular Steinbeck work if you had to boil it down. The forgiveness and tenderness aspects also run through East of Eden, but there are subtleties to how they appear differently.

And as always, his characterization—and its specificity, texture, sense of people stepping through the pages in both a realistic and larger-than-life way—is unparalleled.

For fans of:

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck; Peter Pan retellings (not exactly, but in feel); Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder; Big Sur by Jack Kerouac; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Dear Life by Alice Munro; No one belongs here more than you: stories by Miranda July.