Pineapple cream pie + dreams of an ice box

Welcome to a special Summer Session of Closely Reading, where we’re slowly reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath along with companion reads, all summer long. You’re welcome to join us any time. Paid subscribers will be invited to a live video chat with me at the end of the session, in August. Full schedule available here.

Dear reader,

Today, we’re looking at chapters 14-18 of The Grapes of Wrath along with entries 23-35 in Steinbeck’s journal, Working Days.

If you’re just joining us, you have plenty of time to catch up with the previous week’s guides:

→ Chapter 1
→ Chapters 2-7
→ Chapters 8-13
→ Bonus post (paid subscribers only!)

As a reminder: you can read any edition or copy of the novel (used, new, audio, digital). Here are my recommended editions —

→ The Grapes of Wrath (Be aware: this edition has deckled edges!)
→ The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Classic: this edition has normal page edges!)
→ Working Days

On a journey with the Joads

I owe some renewed energy toward this novel, and toward this story overall, to my friend Errin — an amazing writer and artist I know from way back when, and who I get to see at work every week. She’s a Steinbeck lover and asked me how things were going in our read-a-long today, but she asked it a bit askance:

“You’re not loving The Grapes of Wrath, are you?”

I know she loves the novel; she knows that I know that she loves it, and yet I couldn’t help but say the truth: “Yeah, I’m struggling with it. It hasn’t consumed me the way East of Eden did.”

And I just started talking. Processing out loud.

I didn’t know I was holding this book up to some strange standards and comparisons in my mind — to Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen, to Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, even to Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler and even The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

I didn’t realize I was asking this book to be “like” these other reading experiences were for me; that I am robbing it of its chance to be something new or different; that I was slotting it into a tidy box and wondering why it wasn’t moving me, despite me being overworked and overtired lately — and not bringing anything to the experience myself.

(Except those soured expectations.)

Thank god for good conversation with her, my deeply trusted fellow reader in this weird world. And thank YOU for the comments you’ve been leaving me last week and this one — on my Notes, on our past guides. For keeping the conversation going when I’ve struggled to know what to say or how to write about a book that I’ve been struggling to get “into.”

Today, I want to share the three places where this week’s chapters stopped me in my tracks — and have made me come back, today, with fresh reflections thanks to you and thanks to Errin.

Moment 1: “I lost my land”

In the short pages of chapter 14, I found myself sit back and wonder at what I believe is one of the first and strongest uses of a first-person “I” we’ve encountered in the novel — or at least, in these “parable”-like chapters.

Steinbeck’s craft here suggests he knows it’s the first time he’s truly employed the “first person” voice in the novel — and so he uses it with full analysis of why he’s using it. He leverages the macro-style writing of these intermission chapters to teach us about how individuals transform into groups. How a single person becomes part of a larger social whole.

And he shows us why this collective energy, this sharing of blankets and food, is dangerous. Why it is perceived as a threat by “the owners” who mistake causes for results and results for causes.

I came back to this section tonight because I knew it deserved a second look. I’m so glad I gave it a more sustained one.

The language here is of biology and natural forces: “a cell,” “grows” “grows,” “direction” and “multiplication.” It’s a language of reproduction, of patterns being born, of growth and change. And the language points at the larger system in which this growth occurs, and in which this type of growth becomes “dangerous” because it is accumulative, because it is collective.

Moment 2: Minnie or Susie or Mae

In chapter 15, we get a second “intermission” style chapter, and Steinbeck plays with the form again. This time, we move from the generics of the “Minnie or Susie or Mae” behind the diner counter to a specific woman, Mae, who operates as a kind of tangential episode to our story, highlighting patterns we’ve seen elsewhere.

→ The return of truckers: in chapter 2, we met Tom Joad in the cab of a truck, a quiet and frightened driver confronted with a murderer on parole. In the diner of chapter 15, we meet more truckers — and we see this early pattern of the truckers knowing about the great migration happening. Their trepidation toward the desperate needs of others; their appetite for a slice of cream pie under a wire case. (for what it’s worth: I would’ve picked the chocolate cream.)

→ Hungry children: in previous chapters, we’ve seen the creeping, growing lurk of hunger — a near-constant threat that there won’t be enough food or water for everyone. (I can’t stop thinking about when the Joads realized they forgot water in the scalding heat of the day, or when Casy, Tom and Graves ate together in the dirt of the old house.) In chapter 15, hungry children with dirty feet and wondrous eyes crowd the candy window; their hunger is pervasive and exhausting. Their father is brokering for a loaf of bread, afraid to spend what he has because they’re not done traveling yet…

→ The dream is a lie: Ma wondered early on if California is all it’s cracked up to be. Tom has quietly poked at the fantasy. Now, in this week’s chapters, we see increasingly horrifying signs and proof that orange groves and white picket fences do not await the Joads out west. (Here, in these types of reading moments, I was deeply reminded of the Utopian vision Lauren Olamina carries throughout Octavia Butler’s Parable novels — the way she fantasizes about a world built on ideals that leave no one out, the long roads she walks on her own forced, apocalyptic migration, and how different the end result of her building such a community ends up being.)1

Mae struck me as particularly interesting, given what I noticed in chapter 14. Steinbeck gave us the zoomed-in particulars — the micro — in the macro chapter by invoking the “I” and teaching us how it to turns to “we.”

In chapter 15, immediately after this lesson, Steinbeck gives us a list of macro-generics — the girl behind the coffee counter could be anyone, any Minnie or Susie or Mae — but this time, in this story, it was Mae. And Mae turned the “I” to a “we” when she gave those children candy for a penny.

(Is that how you’re reading that chapter, too? What else are you noticing here?)

Moment 3: “And when’d we get to be bums?”

In chapter 16, as the Joads seek a campsite for the night, they’re confronted with who they’ve become on the road — not who they “really are,” in any sense, but who the wider world and the social world takes them for as a hungry, dirty, tired family on the road.

Tom asks the man asking for four bits for the campsite what difference it makes whether they sleep in the ditch or on the campsite; the man tells him there’s a law against vagrants.

Tom skewers the point the entire novel has been driving at here, with a deft stroke in the characteristic voice we’ve grown to know so well. He’s the truth teller and, like Ma, a kind of glue for the family — keeping them together, not letting them “bust up” when the truck breaks down or when opportunities along the road entice them into a few extra bucks.

We start to recognize, the more often we encounter these laws and these shifting social expectations, that they’re all so deeply inhumane. And what’s more, as Tom points out here, they are purely illogical. Or, rather, they only make sense in the cruel logic of unfettered capitalism.

If I can pay four bits for a campsite, that magically transforms me into a citizen again? If I can’t, the police will haul me off to prison (and charge a fee for my dismissal)? Money, money, money. The gaping maw of the monster from earlier chapters. The endless greed of the system. It gnaws at the Joad family; it gnaws at me as we read.

Flex those close reading muscles

Same exercises as last week — but with new angles and tricks to try.

1. Map the characters. Grab an index card and on it, create a web or map of the characters so far. Then, choose a colored pencil or a symbol for each character, and practice using it in the next 2 chapters — see where having a little self-made annotation system makes it easier for you to note important character “moments,” scenes, dialogue, or growth.

2. Identify themes. Look for a blank page or space in the front of your book. Mark the date and write down a few themes or topics you’ve noticed. As you continue reading, come back to this page to add the date + new themes you’re uncovering. (You can even write down the page numbers you find these themes on — creating a custom index for yourself!)

   → If you’ve tried this one, get caught up by looking back through your most recently-read chapters and seeing if you missed anything you want to go back and add to your index.

3. Commit some sincere flattery. Think back on chapter 15, in the diner. Try writing another, similar style of interlude in the world of the novel. Channel similar themes. Consider placing a “Minnie or Susie or Mae” in a new setting, and doing a short character study. Maybe at a gas station, or a water pump, or a roadside where a family is selling puppies.

What were your “moments” with the novel this week?

Let’s talk about this week’s chapters — and feel free to highlight or share anything you were thinking about as you read Steinbeck’s Working Days this week, too.