2 - The Pastures of Heaven (1932)

Summary

R[obert] M. Coates.

“Books.”

New Yorker, 8

(22 October 1932), 54–5.

The best of the novels I looked into this week is, oddly enough, hardly a novel at all, at least in the sense of having a settled cast of characters and a continuous story about them. This is The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck, published by Brewer, Warren Putnam, and it has to do with the communal life of the inhabitants of a valley in California so charming and so fertile that the Spanish settlers called it by the name which now serves as the title of Mr. Steinbeck's book.

Such a story, dealing with a variety of characters and the intricacies of their relations, must almost necessarily be episodic in treatment, and the danger is that, unless some mood or central theme can be found to bind it all together, it may fall in too loose a pattern, becoming merely a sequence of short stories rather than parts of a connected whole.

It may, indeed, be said that at times Mr. Steinbeck fails to recognize this danger, and gives away occasionally to a leaning for a sort of O. Henry twist at the end of some of his episodes which, while surprising the reader, also has the effect of leaving him a little up in the air. And again, perhaps because this is a first novel, his debt to some of his predecessors in this field of writing—Sherwood Anderson, George Milburn, etc.—is sometimes a little too plainly evident.