THE PEARL:
Read this in honor of Steinbeck's birthday. I think I first encountered this beautiful, heart-breaking, mythic tale in junior high school, but remembered only the vague feeling of doom rather than specifics of the story. Kino, an impoverished Indian pearl fisherman, finds the "Pearl of the World", and dreams of marrying his wife in church, in new clothes, and sending his baby son to school one day. His small village follows Kino and his wife Juana to the pearl dealers where he hopes to sell this natural wonder and secure his family's future. We know the dealers are out to cheat him, and from the beginning it seems that even Kino does not truly believe in his dream, but he has committed to it and must follow where it takes him. This is a perfect gem (pardon) of a story, with exquisite prose and a terrifying inevitability.
Reviewed in 2014 ( )

4/14/22

Just read "Of Mice and Men" Good. I liked it better than "Tortilla Flat". 50% strike rate. I'll try another some time. ( )

Steinbeck is a treasure. ( )

John Steinbeck: The Red Pony

This is one of Steinbeck's shorter novels. It revolves around the life of Jody, a boy of ten years (although constantly referred to as 'the young boy" despite the passage of time), his mother (always referred to as 'her', 'his mother', or 'Mrs.Tiflin'), his father, Carl, (a taciturn, strict disciplinarian), and a ranch hand, Billy Buck ("...a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms".) Only two other characters appear, briefly. One is Gitano, an old paisano who shows up one day because he was born on the property and wants to die there to complete the circle of his life, and Grandfather, Mrs.Tiflin's father, who comes for a visit, and who lives in the memories of his glory days as the leader of settlers pushing westward to the sea.

Not a great deal happens in the story; it is like a miniature painting that illuminates life and lives. Perspective in life matters, and a child like Jody, is sensitive to every nuance of attitude and behaviour, how a word of praise can please and promise, while criticism confounds and confuses. The flip-side of perspective is empathy: understanding another's hope and fears, cares and hurts. Carl is not a bad father, but he lacks empathy and even Billy remonstrates against him a couple of times concerning Jody. At the end of the story, it is interesting that Grandfather and Jody both find, and extend important empathise to each other.

The story is also about the hard lesson that loving and caring for another person, or creature, are no guarantees of happiness because death is part of life; it is inescapable, but at times worse because it seems arbitrary and unjust. Steinbeck's miniature includes death in life, life from death and, while it can still be embraced, death as a fitting end to life. There is also the hard lesson for Jody that even a seemingly omnipotent adult cannot control fate and circumstance.

Grandfather lives for his past and laments that "Westering" has died out in people. For Grandfather, this refers to his leading "a bunch of people made into one big crawling beast" in the push westward to to the sea. For Steinbeck, I think Grandfather's "Westering" is a metaphor for the human search for something bigger, the power of a common cause that binds people together to pursue a common goal.

There is a line in the story that a reader could almost skip over, but I think it encapsulates Steinbeck's themes of perspective, empathy, and understanding, and, more perniciously, their complete absence when dealing with an 'other', especially from the perspective of a "big crawling beast". Grandfather is speaking: "...later, when the troops were hunting Indians and shooting children and burning teepees, it wasn't much different from your mouse hunt."

Steinbeck is a writer concerned with life, with the interactions of family and others in society, set in the simple environments of ordinary people. The people are not rich, not upwardly mobile, not obsessed with status, nor material symbols, nor conspicuous consumption, nor with any of the pressures attendant to these. Strip all of this away, and you have the unadorned lives of ordinary people trying to survive, to live, to manage the pleasures and pains of life.