Reading East of Eden with some friends this summer gave me my first exposure to John Steinbeck. As a rule American literature isn’t my first port of call – Willa Cather and Mark Twain are honourable exceptions – but my first impression of Steinbeck was that he certainly knows how to write. The prose is vivid, the descriptions are colourful and he has a gift for entering into the consciousness of his characters in a way that makes them both sympathetic and convincing.
My second impression was that East of Eden is a very dark book. As I expressed to a friend by text at one point, “237 pages in and we’ve had suicide, patricide, attempted fratricide, attempted murder, theft, prostitution, adultery, allusions to rape and a graphic childbirth.” By the end of the book, a more complete list would also include gang rape, blackmail, alcoholism, domestic violence and child abandonment. In Steinbeck’s world, Eden has been well and truly left behind.
