The modern American writers and I have avoided each other's sideways gazes until quite recently. What I have found in their output has delighted and challenged me in all the ways literature can and should. One cannot help but see the saga of the Trasks and the Hamiltons as anything less than a six hundred page, Californian parable. Steinbeck's prose leaps and gallops through the Salinas Valley he so loves, mapping the the geography of human souls along the way. Original sin and parental folly meet to squall within us all: this is Steinbeck's landscape. For all its excellence, conversation is the tale's trump card; our interior unchartability becomes all the more knowable as we observe the characters' interactions with each another and converse with them ourselves. There's Sam Hamilton's frivolous wisdom and Adam's bipolar sentimentality, the moral confusion of Cal and the possession of Cathy by an evil unknowable. We live east of Eden and there's no returning. The Garden and the Fall reside within us all. It's stories such as these that harken us to press on to the Promised Land. Timshel. Thou mayest.
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