London Book Club: May

Posted on May 25, 2009 in Uncategorized

Just one month after the 70th anniversary of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, our book club met at Waterstone’s to discuss the John Steinbeck classic. The book, which is set at the time of The Great Depression, was originally published in New York by Viking Press on April 14, 1939 (the fourth anniversary of Black Sunday) and won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.

Although the focus of our discussion was primarily The Grapes of Wrath, most of us had read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men when we were at school, and so we could not help but to compare and contrast the two books at various stages of our discussion.

We found the first 100 pages quite tiresome, but we thought the story got much better when Tom Joad (who is the first main character that readers are introduced to) goes home and is reunited with his family. Someone recollected that the storyline of Of Mice and Men was also quite slow to begin.

We did feel that halfway through the story, Tom Joad’s character completely changes. There were some other real ‘characters’ in the book: an ex-preacher who causes quite a stir at one of the camps, and also Uncle John, who on meeting the ex-preacher finds it hard to contain details of his ‘immoral past’. Then there’s Connie, who on first inspection appears to be a loving husband and dutiful son-in-law promising to build a better life for his wife and unborn child, and then later on lets everyone down by disappearing. The relationship between Tom’s parents is beautifully described. Steinbeck highlights how the couple have known each other for so long that they are able to control one another’s behaviour, and prevent the other one from becoming too strong-willed.

We noticed how the Depression led to a detachment of men from labour, and felt that this parallels current times where many people are finding it hard to get a job. There was a huge  emphasis on the mother looking after her family. However, because the women were doing the housework and looking after the children, when the men became unemployed, they no longer had a role. We noticed how this domination by the female sex throughout the book is a sharp contrast to that in Of Mice and Men, where the focus is on the male sex (the only female in the book being Curly’s wife).

We were still a bit baffled about the difference between a depression and a recession (and I imagine it’s something we all should know in light of the current climate!). However, after a few minutes of debate, we came to the conclusion that a recession is when the banks are having an economic crisis, and thought that perhaps a depression is possibly the next stage after a recession. It’s ironic how in The Grapes of Wrath, the economic crisis causes problems for the bank, but with our situation the bank is actually the cause of the economic crisis.

Quite a few people felt that there was a sense of repetitiveness throughout the book. The storyline seemed to consist of an endless cycle of driving, finding somewhere to camp, looking for work, having to move on and then start driving again. Also, Steinbeck appeared to have used a technique throughout the book where he would make a sweeping statement about the kind of suffering that all Okies (nickname given to people from Oklahoma) are going through, and then back up this statement by giving an example using a scene from the Joad family’s life, thus using the example to make his point a second time.

The setting for Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath is a farm or farmland. However, in contrast to Of Mice and Men, which is a hopeful story about the ‘All American Dream’, in The Grapes of Wrath there is no mention of the ‘All American Dream’!

A recent article on the BBC’s website states that The Grapes of Wrath is actually included in the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently banned or challenged books. People were put off by the amount of detail that the book goes into. When the book was published, business was booming in England, so we were curious to know what the British reaction was. The book is known to be disliked by Christians. We thought that this is because of the not-so-religious ex-preacher Casy, who has a very unconventional way of saying grace, and also has an unusual way of defining sin.

We were fascinated by the hatred for the Okies for being the outsiders and foreigners to California. We were also intrigued by the fact that people disliked ‘Reds’ for simply wanting to be paid 30 cents an hour instead of the new going rate of 25, yet at the same time we were astounded by the generosity of all the people at the tent cities, and we felt that the storyline was actually heartwarming as well as tragic.

Before I had finished reading the book, someone else on the SYP committee had told me that there was a sad part towards the end of the story. Everyone who’d managed to get as far as the end (it’s a long book!) felt that the ending was quite shocking, and disturbing in a Little Britain-esque way. One can only imagine that the reason this part was added to the story is again to build on the concept of the generosity of strangers. Perhaps this shocking ending is another of the reasons why the book was banned.

We were a little puzzled by the title of the book, although the family did end up picking grapes when they went to California, and also someone in our group mentioned that they thought the last chapter was about the grapes of wrath. To me, this highlights what a book club is all about: one or many people might be puzzled by some aspect of the book, but yet someone else in the group whose experience when reading the book was different to yours, might just be able to come along and answer your question for you.