So it went with most of the Important Reviews written by Distinguished Critics for the Thoughtful Publications along the Eastern Seaboard. His essay was published New Year’s Eve, 1944, two days before the book’s release. Matthiessen was a distinguished social critic and Harvard professor at the time he got the assignment from The New York Times Book Review. “It’s a puzzler why Steinbeck should have wanted to write or publish such a book at this point in his career.” “If you picked this book up without the author’s name on the title page you might guess that it was someone who had read ‘Tortilla Flat’ and had decided to write a Steinbeck novel,” Matthiessen wrote.

But I liked this potshot from a fellow named F.O.

Now considered a classic, at the time of its publication a certain breed of critics dismissed the work as mere whimsy and easy caricature, the sort of slim pickings that reviewers love to hate because it allows them to mine their febrile talents for hilarious ridicule and clever zingers.ĭescribing the novel’s colorful characters, for instance, Matthiessen wryly noted that it’s a wonder that “they seem entirely free of lice or cirrhosis of the liver or other occupational diseases.”īad reviews are some of my favorite reading - Pauline Kael, the late film critic for The New Yorker, was the master of the devastatingly funny hit pieces. There’s no Timshel in “Cannery Row,” no mystical monologues about the existential struggle to break free from our oppressors, no allegorical bindlestiffs. That’s where Steinbeck refers to Monterey as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” It’s beautiful, really, but that opener tempts readers with a promise of the profound. The only real local bit of deep literary relevance in “Cannery Row” is found in the opening sentence. No one has yet been able to identify a plot in “Cannery Row,” but plots are beside the point. Readers seemed to get a kick out of the slap-happy cast of rascals, bums, inebriates, prostitutes and a beloved marine biologist named “Doc.” Among other things, “Cannery Row” describes the lost entrails of a dead humorist, an artist who used chicken feathers as his medium, and local ne’er-do-wells who sloshed through tide pools in search of sea life they could sell for wine money.

But that didn’t stop Monterey from parlaying John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” into a template for its billion-dollar tourism industry.ĭespite the critics, Steinbeck’s 1945 novel was an instant best seller.

So did most of the other East Coast elites. Previously published on Substack’s Monterey Neighbors & Friends

Tortilla flat book