Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century
by Annette Ferran
The
Grapes of Wrath
A big topic of conversation these days is the
idea that we currently live in the Anthropocene Era; that is, the era defined
by the effects of human beings on the natural world, most tellingly the
climate. At the same time, there
are frequent news stories of “eco-refugees” – people seeking asylum because
weather disasters have made their home countries uninhabitable. The linking
idea is that human endeavors have caused catastrophic changes to the natural
environment, with the result being earthquakes, tsunamis, and droughts that
forever alter landscapes and resources.
With
this lens, John Steinbeck’s epic, The
Grapes of Wrath (#10 on The Modern Library’s list), has renewed relevance.
People
live in the natural world, but people also (and no other species does this)
impose artificiality on it. Nature reacts, in turn imposing conditions that
make it impossible for people to live in the environment. Is a dust bowl a “natural”
disaster when over-farming and over-population have rendered an area of land
incapable of recovering from a cyclical drought? The natural and the political collide.
The Grapes of Wrath is a great novel for
many reasons, but it is especially intriguing to perceive its echoes in our own
time. The novel tells the story of the Joads, who have to leave Oklahoma and
try to head for greener pastures, quite literally. They are among a vast migration of people who left their
homes and tried to make it to California, where the farming was excellent and
jobs were in abundance. They are
extremely poor people, like so many migrants of our current age, with nothing
left to lose but health and life.
It
is significant that the novel starts with descriptions of the landscape and
weather. A turtle makes an appearance
before any human does, and gains character and story trajectory in a passage in
which the humans are anonymous agents in the turtle’s life. This is a story of a world and its
human inhabitants in battle with one another.
Steinbeck
has a way with characters, and the compelling force of this story is the Joad
family and the many people they encounter along the way. It’s a great read, for all ages of
readers, because of the language and style of the narrative with its biblical
overtones, because of Steinbeck’s rendering of dialogue and dialect, and
because of the sheer drama of it all.
It is, like many other novels on the list, a book you can’t put
down.
The novel is biblical not in
the sense that it is trying to convey religious doctrine, but in the sense that
it evokes the Judeo-Christian mythology that is the heritage of these
Americans. Good myths often
involve a journey fraught with hardship and obstacles, illustrating the
enduring character of people, promising something quasi-magical at the end,
once the obstacles are overcome.
The traveler encounters other people along the way and shares stories
and histories with them, thus breaking wide open his personal world and making
him a citizen of the larger one.
This story has exactly all of these elements.
America
is a great land for migration because there are no political borders to
cross. Not to say that the Okies
from the dust bowl were welcome in the communities they travelled to. The poor and dispossessed are
traditionally regarded with suspicion, their poverty seen as a mark of their
undesirability at a basic level.
But in America, the fact of free movement has made migration a part of
the country’s character.
People like the Joads leave their homes because they have to. They can’t make a living in the
destroyed land, and the financial institutions – always stronger than any
individual – take away what little they own. They repossess it, in fact, because the system of money
lending means the people never really owned it to begin with. So they acquiesce, they leave, they
reach optimistically for the promised land. They journey and struggle and find
moments of abject tragedy and
moments of beauty, strength, and community along the way.
The Grapes of Wrath is a great American
novel that should be read by everyone.
Annette Ferran
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher. She is also the
Associate Editor for 10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink, a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.
