The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study by Howard Levant (review)

Studies in American Fiction247 spirit, one which seemed especially to thrive in the U.S. So, while Field has not betrayed Nabokov, he has not given us much more than we already had. One can only hope that the several projects Field mentions, especially the new autobiography, on which Nabokov was working at the time of his death, will come to us in time. Skidmore CollegePhyllis A. Roth Levant, Howard. The Novels ofJohn Steinbeck: A Critical Study. Columbia : Univ. of Missouri Press, 1974. 304 pp. Cloth: $12.50. Ringing manifestoes and a wide assortment of —isms characterize much of the special energy we associate with Modernist literature. The older fiction of Victorian drawing rooms seemed stuffy to the point of suffocation. For writers like Pound and Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, it was high time to break windows, let fresh air in. Something of the same spirit affects contemporary critics, particularly those with a long list of grievances to tack upon the door of the New Critical church. Unfortunately, Pound's dictum about making things NEW does not always mean that one will make them EXCITING. If the New Critics reduced all of literature to the status of a self-contained, lyric poem, the newer theoreticians have a nasty habit of being less poetic and a good deal more reductive. Howard Levant's The Noveh ofJohn Steinbeck is a relentless study in what Warren French's "Introduction" calls "constructionist criticism"—that is, "an examination of the adequacy of their [authors'] blueprints to the embodiment of their vision" (p. x). The result is a densely argued—and, I might add, densely written— book which attempts to see Steinbeck's novels both steadily and whole. As Levant would have it, Steinbeck was a talented writer with "an abundance of every gift and craft the novelist can have" with the telling exception of "an intelligent and coherent sense of what structure is and can do" (p. 1) . Had he been able to read Levant's book his achievements might have been even more dazzling. As it was, however, Steinbeck slogged along, never quite understanding how to harmonize panoramic and dramatic structures. I should hasten to add that the "panoramic (or epic) and the dramatic (scenic or well-made)" (p. 2) are terms Levant appropriates from Joseph T. Shipley's edition of Dictionary of World Literature (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1943), yet another book that Steinbeck seems to have overlooked . As Levant points out in his discussion of Cup of Gold, "too often Steinbeck relies on a panoramic structure. Actually, he does not seem to be completely aware of a difference between the separate kinds of structure" (p. 13). Levant, on the other hand, gives panoramic and/or dramatic a vigorous workout. Each of Steinbeck's novels is weighed against these measures as if they were the alpha and omega of a novelist's concern: A Steinbeck novel tends to have either a panoramic or a dramatic structure. Steinbeck works at the extremes; he rarely combines panoramic and dramatic structures. Usually a panoramic structurein a Steinbeck novel is a series of episodes that are related to each other by little more than chronology. A dramatic structure in a Steinbeck novel is more tightly organized: Events and characters are bound neatly into firm relationships by a brief or highly selective time sequence and often by a moral or philosophic motif (p. 2). 248Reviews In short, The NoveL· ofJohn Steinbeck is a thesis-ridden book, but there are also moments when Levant's good critical sense manages to transcend all the heady constructionist talk. Connie Joad, for example, is characterized as a man with . . . plenty of substance. He is married to Rose of Sharon and deserts her because he has no faith in the family's struggle to reach California . His faith is absorbed in the values of "theBank," in gettingon, in money, in any abstract goal. He wishes to learn about technology in order to rise in the world. He does not admire technology for itself, as Al does. He is a sexual performer, but he loves no one. Finally, he wishes that he had stayed behind in Oklahoma and taken a job driving a...