The rest is history, and they run off to the river to play.Ĭonnie and Rosasharn are next, on the cusp of true adulthood, all they can do is talk about what comes next – the repeated scenes where Ma is made to tell Rosasharn to shut up about Connie taking night classes, even after he has run out on her, hit Rosahsarn’s experience home at first. The boy claims there’s gold in the rock, and that his Pa found gold once, a story which his onlooking acquaintance naturally disputes.

My favourite scene with the children is when a boy picks up a rock, and “squints at it so hard that the other boy near him simply MUST ask what is up”. The children, who learn to interact with one another in the camps, are indispensable to this. The way he uses the diverse characters of the Joad family to show the breadth of experiences of struggle is excellent. Steinbeck switches tack, changing from plot to pondering nearly chapter by chapter, allowing him to build a big picture of the collective experiences that the Joads are part of, before leaping back into a densely plotted narrative about a specific family, with time passing more or less linearly again. I think this – as I have alluded to when referring to not making one’s character’s ‘megaphones’ (a known pet peeve of mine) – combines beautifully with the more strictly narrative elements of the novel. I was especially appreciative of the fact that knowing his characters simply would not say everything he wanted to see without becoming megaphones, Steinbeck takes it upon himself, and some of these chapters resemble poetry more than that parts of a novel, an interesting intellectual escape from the enthralling pace of the narrative sections. Those mini-chapters characteristic especially of the book’s second half, that simply contained authorial monologue, were actually a treat as I got used to the novel.

It seemed early on in my Steinbeck experience that the narrator’s voice simply must be that of an old white man in a university office, one who has an incessantly droning voice, and the size of whose head vastly outweighs the actual cleverness contained within.īut, as I got used to it, I liked that Steinbeck allows the narrator’s voice to be his own. From the Grapes of Wrath filmĪlmost better than discovering this novel though, was discovering Steinbeck. I’ve been gravitating towards American fiction recently, and it seemed amiss not to embark on an exploration of it without having read such a staple American novel. I had, like many students of fiction I suspect, read the first 5 or 10 chapters of the Grapes of Wrath at least twice, but never finished it. There are many things I loved about this book. With a semester behind me and all the excuses in the world to remain quietly in a room reading a book alone, I have just soared through one of my favourite books of all time, for the first time.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck