Just by virtue of logistical logjams, I think about re-reading books a lot more often than I ever get around to actually re-reading them.
That said, all this infuriating news about bonus-wielding AIG execs holding American taxpayers hostage to the supposedly necessary retention of dubious corporate “talent” puts me in mind of the next great depression, which puts me in mind of the last one, which leads me around again to The Grapes of Wrath.
I was a little surprised to discover that neither of my omnibus Steinbeck collections collected it (too fat, I guess), so I did what Americans do when they decide they just have to have something they don’t already have: I went online and bought it.
It arrived today wrapped in this gorgeous Van Gogh-meets-Soviet-realism cover courtesy Vintage’s old Compass Books division, the beauty of which I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog.
I don’t know what they’re teaching in high school these days, but I do know that what’s perceived as Steinbeck’s common-man sentimentality has made for a shaky perch in the canon that’s hard to square with the contemporary blurbage. No less savage an ironist than Dorothy Parker appraised The Grapes of Wrath as follows:
…I think, and with earnest and honest consideration, … that The Grapes of Wrath is the greatest American novel that I have ever read.”
The Swedish Academy, announcing Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize in 1962, wrote:
“His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, the misfits and the distressed; he likes to contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical craving for money.”
Seems like something along those lines might be worth a second look, no? With this financial plague of locusts winging dust in everyone’s eyes?
the browser 