Book of the Week: Cannery Row

This book review is sponsored by the taxis outside my window that feel the need to honk at all hours of the night.  This is a source of great displeasure for me, and it has caused me to seriously consider purchasing the waterballoon launcher I currently have sitting in my Amazon cart.

I doubt that John Steinbeck requires any substantive introduction. Anyone who has taken any kind of English course has been exposed to Steinbeck. I am revisiting Cannery Row, and have found that I appreciate it more the second time around (in a non-modern lit course setting). I could go on about themes, morals, and Steinbeck's underlying symbolism, but I find all of these things to be a detraction from the simple beauty that is a John Steinbeck novel.

Cannery Row follows the townspeople of Cannery Row and centers around a group of misfits led by Mack. Mack and his misfits have frequent encounters with other characters, most notably Doc and Mr Chong.  No one in the row lives in luxury, in fact they live in downright poverty.  A couple lives in an old pipe fitting, and the boys live in a fish meal storage shed affectionately called the Palace Flophouse. However, all of the inhabitants coexist in a place where each knows their role, they accept these roles, and are weighed on the basis of their character.  Although things do not always run smoothly, it seems as though there is always something to look forward to in the Row.

Especially now, I think we can all relate to a longing to live in a place like Cannery Row.  Mack was able to buy an exorbitant amount of booze and other goods from the local market by bartering with frogs.  I highly doubt the guy in the dairy downstairs (who always asks me if I've changed my hair for some reason) would accept frogs as an acceptable form of payment for Milk Duds.  As idealistic as this book may seem though, there are many dark moments interlaced with the main story, and a few are downright shocking. I find the chapter about the gopher to be particularly sad, my dad scarred me with a video of gophers in the desert a while back, I still haven't fully recovered.

I give this book 4.5 honking taxis out of 5.  Everyone should have some Steinbeck under their belt, and this is probably my favourite of his works.