gonna take a bold stance and say this is good.

I’m not sure there’s much I can say that hasn’t been said better, but I found this very engaging and incredibly readable! I liked the scope and the sprawl and the winding detours. Really feels like something trying to grapple with a fundamental question of how to be in the world. it’s got a lot on it’s mind.

Ultimately, about human agency and how much capacity we have to choose. The characters feel, by turns and to degrees, constrained or railroaded by their inherited histories and the stories they tell themselves about their nature and the world. That certain people are bad and have inherited badness and others are good and have inherited goodness. They essentially succeed (or survive) based on their ability to extricate themselves from these stories and take a more honest view of the world and themselves, good and bad, and to continue trying.

Cathy, and Adam and Aron, two sides to the same coin. Cathy unable to see any good, or perceive compassion or love, boxing herself in and growing more and more fearful and paranoid until she can no longer exist. Aron and Adam unable to cope with the bad such that they shut down or run away when they are forced to look at it. Cal, torn between his impulses to take advantage and his desire to do good, who ultimately, with Abra and her own grappling with good and bad, is the hope for continuation.

In some cases the characters lean more archetypal or symbolic and the book more didactic, but I think it gives the novel some fable- or myth-like qualities that are obviously apropos for something using Cain & Abel as a starting point. As someone with very little familiarity with the bible, I liked how the stories of Adam & Eve and Cain & Abel were refracted multiple times through the book - Charles and Adam as Cain and Abel, but also as Adam and Eve and Cathy as the snake in the garden, then Adam and Cathy as Adam and Eve, Tom and Dessie as a version of Cain and Abel, etc., etc.

I did a little googling to see how old Steinbeck’s sons were when he was working on this (8 & 6, when it was published), because it very much felt like it was for them, in the recounting of the place and time Steinbeck grew up and their own family being woven into the story.