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It's a perplexing book—melodramatic, self-indulgent, even trashy; yet at last you feel you're reading a real novel rather than fictionalized reportage—a novel with strong characters, large-scale story development, a central idea holding it together. And in the first-person passages, which lovingly reimagine his mother's family, the Hamiltons, he was able to move beyond the impersonality of his earlier work.
The fulcrum of the book is the tragic story of the fictional Trasks: Adam, the good man; Cathy (Eve), his evil wife; Adam's brother, Charles; and a second pair of brothers, Adam's sons, Cal and Aron (Cain and Abel, in case you missed the connection). To an impressive degree Steinbeck succeeds in turning this ambitious metaphor into a moving human drama, and it can be gripping when it isn't maddening. Alas, it's disfigured by the most intrusive of all his guru figures, who stains the narrative with his relentless wisdom. This is Lee, Adam's Chinese "houseboy," who discards his faux pidgin in order to say profound things in impeccable English (he's been to college and, as a hobby, translates classic Chinese poetry into English). It's Lee who introduces to Adam (and to us) the ultimate message of East of Eden and the heart of Steinbeck's philosophy: the Hebrew concept of timshel, which Lee happens to have picked up from a learned old rabbi. Timshel, we're told, means "Thou mayest"; in other words, thou hast a choice. "I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because 'Thou mayest.'" And he can cook, too!
On the positive side, Steinbeck's descriptive style is by now highly fluent and convincing. How surely, for instance, he evokes the town's brothels:They seemed very small, and they tried to efface themselves in outside neglect, and the wild overgrown front yards tried to hide them from the street. Remember how the shades were always drawn with little lines of yellow light around their edges? You could hear only a murmur from within. Then the front door would open to admit a country boy, and you'd hear laughter and perhaps the soft sentimental tone of an open-face piano with a piece of toilet chain across the strings, and then the door would close it off again.
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