16 - Cannery Row (1945)

Summary

Nathan L. Rothman.

“A Small Miracle.”

Saturday Review, 27

(30 December 1944), 5.

When you have finished reading Cannery Row you know that John Steinbeck has passed another of his small miracles. It is the best thing he has done since The Grapes of Wrath, although it is not quite like that, in ways that we shall discover. This goes back in style and substance to those other brilliant little tales he wrote, to Monterey County in California again, where once we met Lennie and George, and Danny and the paisanos. Add to these the people of Cannery Row: Doc, and Mack, and the boys, and the bright-haired Dora, for they are likely to seem as memorable. They are caught up alive for us, stirring and functioning, in the whole, integral atmosphere of their shacks along the shore line, the canneries, and the flophouse, Lee Chong's store, Doc's marine laboratory, Dora's Bear Flag Restaurant.

There is one fairly consistent thread of plot that runs tenuously through the book. It will seem trifling when it is mentioned: the blundering and fantastic attempts of the other inhabitants of the Row to show their love for… Doc, to throw him a party, to serve him in their untutored ways, like the fabled Juggler at the altar. But more important is the series of individual and group portraits revealed along the way, and most important of all the spiritual correspondence between place and people.