9 - The Long Valley (1938)

Summary

Wilbur Needham.

“New Steinbeck Book: Event of Autumn.”

Los Angeles Times,

18 September 1938,

Part 3, p. 6.

John Steinbeck has published nothing that was beneath himself, and he never will. Curiously, he also gives you the impression that he has printed nothing that is quite up to himself; there is a sense of reserve power in all his novels and stories, of material deliberately withheld, of ideas that will some day be unleashed. Yet nothing is gone from any of his work, just as nothing is there that ought not to be.

His books are effortlessly right. His work has perfection, but not the precious perfection that is sterility. Everything he writes has the perfection of finality, even the stories he does not like himself. His pages are as uncluttered as those of Robert Nathan, as rich as Thomas Wolfe's.

He can be delicate, shy, mystical; he can be vulgar, brutal, even horrifying; he can be quiet like a mouse, light of step as a deer on the Salinas hills, warm as the sun on a lazy paisano's back. And he can laugh, ah, how the man can laugh! Low and soft and bending over to hear little people laughing back at him; loud and boisterous with drinkers making tavern walls shake down; sly and chuckling when satiric laughter struggles in his throat.

All these moods and tones are in the sixteen tales of The Long Valley; and they are there without spoiling the book's essential unity.