Student Companion to John Steinbeck (review)

Cynthia Burkhead's Student Companion to John Steinbeck (2002), part of the Student Companions to Classic Writers Series published by Greenwood Press, successfully accomplishes its primary purpose. The series foreword announces that the volume is intended to provide "easy to use and yet challenging literary criticism" for the "non-specialist and general reader" (vii). The volume's coverage, convenient organization, and systematic analyses, along with its useful bibliography, make it an excellent starting point for students and general readers who are new to Steinbeck criticism.

The volume's structured approach to Steinbeck's work is one of its most appealing features. It begins with a brief biography and a chapter detailing Steinbeck's lasting contributions to American literature. The next six chapters cover the novels that students would most likely be assigned: Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, The Pearl, and East of Eden. The final chapter discusses Steinbeck's most frequently anthologized short stories: "The Gift," "The Leader of the People," "The Chrysanthemums," and "Flight." Each chapter includes sections that analyze various literary features of Steinbeck's texts including setting, plot, and structure; characters; themes; symbols; and alternative reading.

In each chapter, setting, plot, and structure is the strongest section. Besides providing plot summaries, these sections show how setting and careful narrative design drive both action and character development in Steinbeck's fiction. Burkhead pays particular attention to the influence of setting, encouraging students to think critically about the role of physical place in each of the texts. Whether Burkhead sees settings as merely backdrop, as in Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and The Pearl, or vivid and dynamic, as in The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and East of Eden, she examines how Steinbeck's main characters are products of their physical locations and how action is driven by characters' responses to stimuli in their surrounding environments. She demonstrates that Steinbeck's often meticulous attention to physical location is one of the defining features of his fiction.

She also analyzes recurring themes throughout the text, thus providing students with a helpful introduction to Steinbeck's most significant ideas. For example, she introduces Steinbeck's phalanx theory early on and shows how he explored its implications for human behavior in nearly all of the works that she includes. Likewise, she defines and discusses literary Naturalism as an important controlling feature in the development of Steinbeck's themes. One drawback in her discussion of both setting and theme, however, is the significant lack of textual support. Because the volume is primarily an overview, many of Burkhead's points are simply assertions. Though a knowledgeable reader or Steinbeck critic may agree with the validity of those assertions, the volume does little to encourage novice students to think critically about how to support major assertions about Steinbeck's work with evidence from his texts.

The lack of supporting evidence is a particular problem in the alternative reading sections and the biography. The alternative reading sections are intended to offer "an alternative critical perspective" from which students can explore each text, such as a Marxist or feminist perspective (viii). These brief sections, though admirable in their attempt to introduce students to more advanced concepts in literary criticism, merely provide oversimplified, one-paragraph definitions of very complex critical phenomenon, like feminism. They then provide very general, undeveloped overviews of how a particular Steinbeck text may be read in relation to one specific critical phenomenon. Some sections are better than others. For example, she shows how a consideration of literary archetypes, like good versus evil and the evil mother figure, provides useful insights into East of Eden. The psychological critique of Cannery Row though, with its two-paragraph explanation of Freud and undeveloped assertions about Mack and the boys' and Doc's Oedipal problems, could easily lure inexperienced students into making arguments that would be very difficult to support without sufficient textual evidence.

A similar problem could arise from the opening biography. Though introducing major events in Steinbeck's...