An old classic, this is my least favorite Steinbeck book.
Situated mainly in Connecticut and the area around Salinas, California before and up to the middle of WWI, the characters are diverse, but almost none are normal. The main character, Adam Trask, falls for the psychopathic killer (she is not the only one) Cathy Ames, who abandons her twins at birth to secretly run a house of prostitutes. It seems prostitution is everywhere and operating quite openly.
There is a lot of keen insight into human nature, the horrors of war and reflections about life, but the characters are almost without exception deeply flawed individuals, with emotional highs and lows of an extreme nature, and secret pasts that abound. The exception is Lisa Hamilton. The opaque and twisted emotions ascribed to characters often left me confused
There are some interesting quotes:
“To a man born without a conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish.”
“It was well known that Lisa Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.”
The endless interpersonal strife and fighting somehow made this story unrealistic for me, and it is long with irrelevant long descriptions of such things as the weather, clothing, and physiologic responses to various emotions.
3.5/5
The Passionate Reader 