Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck - William Souder

According to its publisher, William Souder’s Mad at the World is the first “full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century.” As someone who has been reading John Steinbeck’s work for decades, I knew surprisingly little about the author’s personal life or the “story” behind even his best known works. That is no longer the case because Souder’s biography deals in depth both with Steinbeck, the man, and everything of consequence that he wrote during his lifetime attempts to avoid the demands of his ever-growing fame. 

John Steinbeck was not a man who had a lot of close friends, and he could be quick to discard the ones he did have. He was an egocentric man who took criticism of his work personally, meaning that those who dared to criticize him (even it was part of their job) often suffered the consequences of being shut out from his life for having been so bold. Even as a boy, he was always the outsider who seemed to prefer his own company to that of others. He was obsessed with his writing, but considered himself such a gift to women that he spent much of his time drinking and womanizing. He even had such little self-awareness at times that he bragged of his countless conquests to drinking buddies and former lovers - often even in writing. Steinbeck was married three times, producing two sons by his second wife. That neither son seems to have ever had much good to say about their father is telling. That they were bitter about their upbringing is an understatement.

Some of his best ideas, including some of those responsible for his most famous and best-received books, came from ideas, diaries, articles, stories, and the like, that others shared with him. Generating new ideas seem to have been Steinbeck’s biggest obstacle, but what he did with those ideas, even the ones previously abandoned by others, is unarguably brilliant. Never a man to be much impressed by money and fame, Steinbeck grew more and more unhappy with his life as fame and fortune found him. His problem was that money went through his hands even more quickly than it came to him. Year after year, he had to borrow money to pay the taxes on the previous year’s income even when he had a fortune coming in from book sales, Broadway plays, and movies.

But that is not all there is to know about John Steinbeck. As Souder puts it:

“What’s clear is that his mind was aflame from an early age, and that certain impulses fell into place and took hold of young John Steinbeck, a boy who could not conform, who could not tolerate a bully, and who believed that somewhere within the solitude he craved there was a world that could be rendered sensible and fair. These tendencies were hard to reconcile and hinted at a difficult but consequential life ahead.”

Steinbeck’s best work came from his anger at what he saw all around him in California’s Salinas Valley. He was sickened by the way immigrant crop-pickers were treated despite their importance to the entire country, and when the Great Depression resulted in the valley being inundated with starving people from other states, he did his best to publicize their plight. But even then, because he struggled so greatly to know where to start, Steinbeck had to look “outside of himself” for the idea that would turn into The Grapes of Wrath. Still, he hoped that the book would fall from the bestseller lists within six months so that he could be forgotten forever.

Bottom Line: Mad at the World succeeds in humanizing the man responsible for some of the best, and best known, books of the last century. That John Steinbeck was not a particularly likable man can hardly be disputed, but the importance of the books he produced over a relatively short lifetime is equally indisputable. His “instinct for privacy…bordered on pathological” and although he tried to hide it, he often suffered from depression. John Steinbeck was a man driven to write but totally unprepared to handle the success his writing would bring. Mad at the World leaves me wondering if he ever had a truly happy day in his life.

William Souder

A New Wrinkle Comes Along Just in Time

 In an attempt to shake the mood I've been in for the last three or four days, I decided to take a look at how my reading is likely to go for the remainder of this cursed year. All I've really felt much like doing for a few days is to bury myself inside a book, only coming out of hiding long enough to take care of those things that can't be avoided. And the more I'm forced to go out in public (especially to the grocery store), the less I believe that people are not just inherently too stupid for their own good. OK...rant over. I promise.

So, here's what the rest of December looks like for me:

I'm something like six decades beyond the target audience of this children's classic, but my curiosity has finally gotten the best of me. It's one of those books I've been hearing about for what seems like forever, and I still see it referenced several times a year despite how little I read of YA or Middle-Grade books. I jumped into it last night as soon as I found out it was immediately available from my library. So far at least, it's everything good I've heard about it - and it has already been instrumental in changing my mood for the better.

Although I've been reading John Steinbeck for most of my life, I've never taken an in-depth look at his life despite owning a door-stop-sized Steinbeck bio that's been around the house for at least thirty years. The highly praised Mad at the World caught my eye a few weeks ago, though, and I decided to give that one a look. I'm now about 80% of the way through it, and I've learned so much about Steinbeck's personal life that I'll never see him the same. If you are a biography reader, I recommend this one.

I'm about half-way through Strongheart and plan to finish it before the end of the month. The tone of this third book in the series is much more somber and ominous than that of the first two books despite all the terrible things that happened to the white women and the tribes they have married into in those first two. Part of that, of course, is because we all know how the story ends for those tribes and what happens to them next. The writing is still strong, and Jim Fergus continues to tell a great yarn despite what the ultimate ending of the trilogy has to be.

I'm reading Dark Passage from this Library of America collection of five David Goodis novels from the 1940s and 1950s. Goodis isn't as well known today as some of his contemporary crime novelists, but he was definitely one of the better writers of dark crime fiction from that era. Dark Passage is one of his better known novels, probably because of its movie version, and I'm suitably impressed already even though I'm less than one-third of the way through it. I'm looking forward to reading the other four novels in 2021 and 2022.

I'm in the process of pulling together my January books right now, and hoping to get off to a nice fresh start to the coming year. Surely (please, please, please) 2021 has to be better than the one we've all just endured. At the very least, readers will still have books - lots of them - to lose themselves within when the going gets tough.

Book-Lover Humor Times Eight

I am an easy target for "bookish" cartoons because they seldom fail to make me laugh...or at least smile. That's why I can't help clipping them when I run across them someplace on the web. 

I doubt that all of these will be new to anyone, but I hope there's something here that makes your day at least a little bit better:

In Her Tracks - Robert Dugoni

I have to admit that I was reluctant to begin reading Robert Dugoni’s In Her Tracks after I noticed that the book is Dugoni’s eighth Tracy Crosswhite novel. I wondered how much not having more of the detective’s backstory in-hand would detract from my enjoyment of this new one, and feared it was probably too late a book for me to jump into the series as a first-time reader. That seemed fair neither to Dugoni nor to me. Happily, as it turns out, I needn’t have worried.

Dugoni handles late-starters like me by seamlessly inserting the skeleton of Crosswhite’s backstory throughout the first few chapters of In Her Tracks. Tracy Crosswhite, who has a tenth-month-old daughter, extended her maternity leaver in order to deal with the  psychological damage she suffered the previous winter. She has, in fact, been diagnosed with “situational PTSD” and is seeing a counselor. But now, Crosswhite believes that she is ready to return to her job as a Violent Crimes detective in the Seattle Police Department. She has been working there with the same team of detectives for over ten years, and she’s missed them. Departmental Captain Johnny Nolasco, though, hasn’t been particularly looking forward to her return and has, in fact, assigned her old desk to a new female detective. The “mutual animosity” Nolasco and Crosswhite share is nothing new; it goes all the way back to their days at the police academy. Now, they tolerate each other only because it is to their mutual benefit.

The good captain can hardly wait to tell Crosswhite that the only empty desk he has in the Violent Crimes group is the one working cold cases — and that he only even has that desk available  because the detective on it is retiring. For Tracy Crosswhite, it’s either work cold cases or quit, and both of them know that Nolasco is really hoping that she takes the second option. Which is exactly why she won’t quit.

Crosswhite has long been one of the best detectives the SPD has, and when her old partner asks for her help on a case involving a female jogger who has just gone missing, she jumps in with both feet despite already having begun work on her own cold case involving a little girl who disappeared five years earlier. Captain Nolasco, to say the least, is not happy when he learns that Crosswhite has so quickly strayed from her cold case work, and he pulls her from the new case. Crosswhite, however, soon figures a way to link other cold cases with the current missing-jogger investigation closely enough to use the older cases as a backdoor into the jogger case, at the same time figuring that what Captain Nolasco doesn’t know can’t hurt her. 

Bottom Line: If In Her Tracks is any indication, the Tracy Crosswhite novels are largely the type of character-driven ones that most appeal to readers who enjoy immersing themselves in long series. Half the fun in a detective series comes from watching the main characters evolve over time into people readers eventually come to love and respect. The other half, of course, comes from reading about cleverly constructed cases the fictional detectives must solve over the course of a number of years. It gets even better when two or three cases are simultaneously explored in the same novel, but not all writers can pull off that trick. Robert Dugoni is one of those who can, and he does it without all of the confusion that often accompanies trying to follow more than one plot line at a time. The last thing I need right now, as a reader, is another long detective series to keep up with, but I’ve gladly added the Tracy Crosswhite series to my reading list.

Robert Dugoni (Photo by Douglas Sonders)

Review Copy provided by Publisher

The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America - Tom Zoellner

“All that country means all that driving. Horizon plus time: an exultant combination.” (Page 38) 

Tom Zoellner is a wanderer, a man who has spent countless hours wandering the backroads of America making note of what he discovers at each stop along the way. Zoellner has been wandering long enough now to have reached some conclusions about America and her people, and he shares those experiences (and conclusions) with the rest of us in The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America, a collection of fourteen essays he’s written over the years. I do wish the book had been written more in the “road trip” style than it was, but that did not keep me from finding most of the essays fascinating. 

It was in the collection’s third essay, “Drive,” that I confirmed that Tom Zoellner is a man who sees being on the open road — with no real destination in mind — exactly how I’ve viewed it all my life:

“Into the car and away — away to the next valley over the ridge, away to the next town, the next exit, the unknown lump of color around the turn in the road just out of sight, leading and receding. Into the car, into the country. Here is where I feel most at ease and have since the age of majority: propped upright and relaxed at the wheel, the country spinning along outside the windows.”

There is little I love more than the spell of motorized land journey, a languorous day, a vague forward-looking destination in mind and a full tank of gas. If there is an opportunity to fly, I will not take it…” (Page 37)

I so totally identify with those two little paragraphs that I could have written them myself — and that glorious feeling is one of the main things that 2020’s pandemic has stolen from the rest of us for way too long. 

Other essays in the book include mini-histories of the State of Nevada and Las Vegas, the Mormon faith and its sacred sites that can be found all over America, the corrupt towns that spring up in the shadow of places like St. Louis, and the exploitation of America’s indigenous tribes by New England’s earliest settlers. Another of the more road-trip-like essays recounts Zoellner’s attempt to set foot on the point of highest elevation in all 48 contiguous states, a feat he is remarkably close to having achieved.

The National Road, however, is not a particularly optimistic book at all when it comes to the changes Zoellner has observed over the years. He is correctly dismayed by the divisions he sees along the lines of politics, religion, and economic opportunities — divisions that run so deeply that they are evident these days to far more casual observers than Zoellner. Something is terribly wrong when a country so casually “writes off” entire portions of the country as not worth saving. To his credit, the author recognizes that those places are “primarily rural” and located “in politically conservative regions.” When so many Americans are “shut out from their own country,” bad things happen. And they don’t happen only in the exclusion zones. 

Bottom Line: Tom Zoellner has learned much from all those hours behind the wheel, and what he has to say about America in The National Road needs to be heard, especially by those who may be able to do something about the spread of the country’s “exclusion zones.” I suspect, however, that because the political splits run so deeply now, those are the people least likely to get the message. 

Tom Zoellner

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground - Alicia Elliott

Maybe I expected too much from Alicia Elliott’s memoir A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Maybe it’s my fault that I found the book so frustrating and, in the end, more confusing than enlightening. I wanted (still do want) to learn more about how North America’s indigenous people live today and whether the reservation system has been overall a good or a bad thing for them. As it turns out, this is not the book to answer that kind of question despite Elliott’s complaints that whites do not bother to wonder what their lives are like today. 

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a memoir centered on the dysfunctional family that Alicia Elliot had the misfortune to grow up in. Elliot, whose mother is a white Catholic and whose father is a Canadian Mohawk, grew up in a home where her mother was institutionalized once or twice a year on average when the mentally ill woman’s bipolar depression became too much for Elliot’s father to handle. What the author so frankly reveals about her childhood is as disturbing as it is sad: the constant hunger, living largely on whatever junk food was available, a case of head lice that lasted more than a decade, being accepted by neither whites nor indigenous schoolmates, etc., but what she describes is a function of poverty not exclusive to indigenous Americans or Canadians. 

As readers learn, this is largely a book about depression and those who suffer from it either directly or indirectly. The book’s title, in fact, is a translation of a Mohawk phrase for depression in which such a person is described as having a mind “literally stretched or sprawled out on the ground.” According to Elliott, indigenous people suffer disproportionately from depression, and that is because of the colonialism her people are still suffering from to this day. And, she says, until her people “decolonize” their minds, the problem will not go away.  

Even so, Elliott does not seem to expect all that much, for instance, to result from today’s efforts to make the publishing world more obviously reflect real-world diversity because “diversity is a white word.” As she puts it in a quote attributed to a Tania Canas essay of that title:

Diversity is about making sense of difference “through the white lens…by creating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness.”

Elliott says, “That is the crucial problem with the push for ‘diversity’ in publishing…’diversity’ is not about letting those who aren’t white make whatever art matters to them and their communities.” She goes on to say that, “It’s the literary equivalent of ‘ethnic’ restaurants: they please white people because they provide them with ‘exotic’ new flavours, but if they don’t appease white people’s sensitive taste buds they’re not worth a damn.” 

Alicia Elliott’s frustration and anger is obvious in her words, attitude, and accusations even when she momentarily turns her biting sense of humor on herself to make a point about how her childhood memories are different from those of most people, “…my childhood itches. This makes sense, since I had head lice for over a decade. My relationship with head lice was, until recently, the longest relationship I’d ever had.”  

The book’s anger is understandable when one considers the generational impact of Canada’s and America’s genocidal approach to their indigenous peoples. The despair and low self-expectations passed from one generation to the next, according to Elliott, continue to plague these people. And she is angered that those who even acknowledge that “awful things” were done in the past expect people like her to forgive and move on with their lives. I’m not convinced she is right about that, but I can understand why she believes it.

Alicia Elliott