Word: steinbeck
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...John Steinbeck's new novel moves like the bus, Sweetheart, through a day of heavy spring rains in the Salinas valley country of California. The setting, familiar to Steinbeck readers, comes out fresh and fragrant in Steinbeck's prose. A few of the characters are fragrant too, but his story, a sort of Grand Hotel in a bus, is cunning and cheap. The Book-of-the-Month Club, though making the book its March choice, has warned its readers: "Mr. Steinbeck . . . may write too freely for the taste of some readers, particularly parents who may have teen...
...Wayward Bus, which Steinbeck wrote in 90 days last summer in the air-conditioned Manhattan office of his publisher, is his first book since Cannery Row, his first full-length novel since The Grapes of Wrath...
Stock Role. Thus assembled for their adventure, each of Steinbeck's principal characters may be dimly identified with a stock role in a leftist parable. Juan is a figure of free enterprise and individualism -sexual, of course, as well as economic. Pritchard is a cartoon of the corpsy soul of Anglo-U.S. capitalism, self-deceived and remote from natural life; Mrs. Chicoy is a type of frank, stupid and violent sensuality; Mrs. Pritchard is The Nice Woman, that baneful figure, whose frigidity is the source and symbol of her other deathly qualities; Mildred, her sulky offspring, apparently represents...
...simple-mindedness of the story is saved once in a while by Steinbeck's incidental touches. His chapters on Alice's solitary jag and on Camille's tired parrying of Louie, a diffident but brutal tinhorn Don Juan, are clever little stories in themselves. He writes with delicacy of the blundering stratagems and satisfactions of an adolescent mechanic called Pimples. But in theme and design the novel is a disappointing piece of second-rate, back-to-the-bulls fiction. Moreover, Steinbeck writes carelessly. Mrs. Pritchard has never known a day's pain on page...
...washed-out legend, "Repent." Mildred gives herself satisfactorily to Juan in a barn and Pritchard, repulsed by Camille, reverts to the Pleistocene by outraging his wife in a cave. What the symbolism of repentance has to do with the characters is not made clear. But readers aware of Steinbeck's great reputation and considerable gifts will feel that he has cause to repent as a novelist...