The Grapes of Wrath

So I finished Candide and wrote a few paragraphs on it in my journal, and that was the end of it. Now that I’m out of school, I’ve been voraciously devouring books of my own choosing, the most recent of which I decided would be John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I read about a third of it before I realized that I didn’t like it, and for the very same reason that I considered Candide a literary failure: it is entirely transparent. The structure of The Grapes of Wrath is based around the odyssey of the Joads—a poor family that is forced out of Oklahoma—but against their plight is the generalized symphony of the entire nation: every other chapter delves into a new scene that depicts the state of the country in the 1930s. It is this system, which I could only describe as pretentious, that started to get to me. After the 140 pages that I read, I started to feel like I was being beaten over the head with what the book wanted me to understand; and readers that may be familiar with my pet peeves know that this will make me give up on a book faster than almost anything else. I realized that however wonderfully crafted the sentences might have been, they wove themselves into a tapestry that screamed repeatedly: Corporate America is destroying the lives of its people, do something! So I put the book down.

I’m curious to see what other people think, if you’ve read The Grapes of Wrath and found it more digestible, if you’ve read any blatantly political works and found them anything but annoying. To me it’s all an issue of transparency: if you’re going to write an obvious treatise designed to elicit a reaction, why not just publish an essay? There’s a certain artistry associated with literature, and its complexity deserves more than well-written propaganda. I’ll take that opinion to my grave.