The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism ed. by Donald R. Noble (review)

162 Canadian Review of American Studies Donald R. Noble, ed. The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, New York: Whiston Publishing Company, 1993. Pp. 278. Anyone who has been teaching a survey course in American literature for a period of years has undoubtedly had to recently confront one of the practical results of the canon wars in the discipline: the problem of who to exclude from the course, after writers such as Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston have been included. Part of my solution has been to make a casualty of John Steinbeck, even though I have always enjoyed his fiction, and even though up until a few years ago one of his novels-usually The Grapes of"Wrath-had been on the course since I began to teach in 1969. Despite my liking for Steinbeck, however, my decision to exclude his books has been relatively easy because, during my graduate education, I had been encouraged to believe that his popular reputation was wildly incommensurate with his real worth. Nevertheless, now that I have banished him, I occasionally feel regretful . I suspect that the most appropriate audience for the collection of new essays entitled The Steinbeck Question are readers like myself with a similar ambivalence towards the writer. The tquestion, addressed, directly or indirectly , by most of the seventeen essays is why Steinbeck-with his long and varied career, his immense and continuing Mark Twain-like popularity, and his many awards (culminating with the Nobel Prize)-should be either reviled , patronized, or ignored by so many academic readers. One essay (by Jackson Benson) addresses this question directly by discussing factors such as professorial distrust of best-selling writers. Other essays defend Steinbeck by arguing that the charges that have been levelled against even his most prestigious texts (that they are sentimental, for example, or programmatically lnaturalistic,' or intellectually confused) are unfair or wrong. Still other essays try to convince readers that Steinbeck is a writer of more than two or three worthwhile books. In addition to articles such as these, the collection also contains a few others which suggest either that Steinbeck had significant weaknesses as a writer, or that he wrote bad books, particularly near the end of his career, and theorize about the reasons for these limitations. As one might expect from a collection such as this, the quality of the essays is uneven. Moreover, the book contains some surprising emphases: Book Reviews 163 two rather lengthy discussions of Bombs Away, for example, a World War Two propagandistic piece "detailing the training of a bombing crew from induction to efficient flying team 11 (214), as well as an article about the movie Viva Zapata!, which is arguably much more about the director, Elia Kazan, than it is about the scriptwriter, John Steinbeck. The collection also has some surprising absences, in that it contains no real discussion of Of Mice and Men, The Wayward Bus, and The Winter of Our Discontent. Despite these problems, however, this is a useful volume, because not only do almost all of the essays contain at least some good discussion, but most are of reasonably high quality, and a few are excellent. In the latter category I want to mention the articles by Mimi Reise! Gladstein, Sylvia Cook, and H. R. Stoneback. Gladstein's wide-ranging discussion focuses on the large disparity between the types of women who normally people Steinbeck's fiction (either women in traditional roles, or whores) and the many untraditional ones who were important to him in his personal life, beginning with his sister Mary, and including teachers, women with scientific knowledge, union organizers (whom Mac in In Dubious Battle is probably a composite of), and so on. Based upon Gladstein's evidence, it is easy to support her dismissal of those critics who defend Steinbeck's images of women by arguing that he was reflecting social reality. Sylvia Cook's essay concerns itself with the often subtle differences in Steinbeck's portrayal of poor people and the condition of poverty. By using comparisons with Thoreau as a means of illuminating Steinbeck's treatment of poverty in Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, The Grapes of Wrath, and Cannery...