Searching for Eden: John Steinbeck’s Ethical Career by John H. Timmerman (review)

Expectations, replete with a Christian worldview and assumptions, whose subtleties may otherwise elude more casual readers of the text, such as its characters’ frequent quotations from the Bible (116). If not for Ryken, most audiences would remain unaware of these allusions and of the faith statement in Dickens’s last will and testament (1869): ‘‘I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’’ (qtd. 14). Teachers and students of Dickens will both benefit from this comprehensive, yet reasonably priced Guide to the Classics for years to come. Amanda E. Himes John Brown University John H. Timmerman. Searching for Eden: John Steinbeck’s Ethical Career. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2014; 179 pp.: ISBN 0-88146-478-3, $29.00 (hbk). Following his earlier works on John Steinbeck and ethics, including essays ‘‘Charley, America, and Malory: John Steinbeck’s Later Ethics’’ and ‘‘John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken,’’ John Timmerman’s Searching for Eden considers the development of Steinbeck’s ethical worldview and its presence in his fiction and life. Between 1930 and 1965, Steinbeck, according to Timmerman, moved from an ethical stance centered on ‘‘Social Justice’’ to one situated in ‘‘Ideal Justice’’ (2). In Steinbeck’s early stage, justice is ‘‘constituted of a communal spirit,’’ and, too often, civilization fails to meet the ‘‘needs of social outcasts’’ (2). Timmerman identifies three major events in the twentieth century that prompted Steinbeck’s search for answers to ethical injustices. The first was the Great Depression, which reinforced his belief that the ‘‘existential, self-pleasure principle of non-teleological thinking was deeply, profoundly flawed’’ (4). Humans have an ethical responsibly to correct others’ suffering. The second event was a personal experience for Steinbeck: the Vietnam War. Steinbeck served as a journalist during the war and ultimately believed that ‘‘war . . . is the ultimate degradation and cheapening of human life’’ (4). Finally, the Civil Rights Movement demonstrated social upheaval and racial injustices during the 1950s and 1960s. Starting around 1950, Steinbeck’s vision of justice shifted from, in Robert DeMott’s words, a ‘‘communal vision of life toward an engagement with universal human values rooted in traditional notions of creative choice, individual consciousness , and inherited legacy’’ (qtd. 3). To engage these ‘‘universal human values,’’ Steinbeck looked backwards, finding answers to contemporary injustices in ‘‘fifteenth -century England’’—particularly in Malory’s Arthurian tales. Timmerman opens his first chapter with a brief introduction to ethics, ensuring that scholars and readers understand his philosophical assumptions. Timmerman 362 Christianity & Literature 64(3) explains, ‘‘First, ethics, the science of morality, is not concerned with every kind of judgment an individual voluntarily makes’’ (12). Getting dressed for work is not necessarily—and probably is not—an ethical decision. He continues, ‘‘Second, ethics is concerned with moral judgment about the rightness or wrongness of conduct . Third, this judgment does not arise from a particular sentiment . . . but it arises from a norm or idea of the right or the good’’ (12). Ethics, according to Timmerman, is oriented around how particular actions are right or wrong in light of certain moral constructs. In his second chapter, Timmerman introduces Steinbeck’s early worldview as a form of ‘‘naturalistic [ethics] . . . championing a creed of decency as an ethical guideline to right action’’ (49). As a naturalistic system, Steinbeck’s early ethics center on ‘‘characteristics of the tide pool—protection, reproduction, and survival ’’; however, Timmerman asserts that the tide pool also describes animal behavior (49). Another component is needed to describe ethical human behavior. For Steinbeck, this component is decency, a virtue that has a twofold response. The first describes how communities behave toward individuals. A decent community ‘‘honor[s] that individuality even within the group’’ (49). The second part of decency describes ‘‘how that individual acts in community, either enabling others or denigrating and destroying them’’ (49). Chapter 3 explores the emergence of Steinbeck’s early ethics in his life and in his fiction, particularly in The Grapes of Wrath. According to Timmerman, Steinbeck’s early ethics and works responded to the ‘‘plight of the migrants’’ who were ‘‘the poorest of the poor—semiliterate, unskilled laborers’’ (52). His response to migrants provided a...