#37 - The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck said that his goal was "to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible" for the Great Depression, and boy howdy, he achieved that. At odds with all of my business-school learning, The Grapes of Wrath brought with it a thundering condemnation of big industry, preaching liberal, even communist economics in the face of wealth disparity. In fact, it really started to get under my skin just how much of the message of the book applied to the things I was learning about today's business world - from the rise of temp agencies doing piecework manual labour to sub-prime mortgages to commercials I'm watching right now about individual farmers growing from 160 acres to 20,000 acres, it seems as though nothing has changed.

It's also why I think that The Grapes of Wrath is an absolutely fantastic book for teaching in schools, both in the US and Canada. It gives a clear picture of the Great Depression in every conceivable way. The book talks about how they slaughtered animals and managed early cars, how the typical work-day happened, the way that the Okies spoke. It also talks about how the incumbent population responds to an influx of poor immigrants, regardless of how similar they are otherwise. It talks about how companies and banks respond to times of crisis by pushing against the middle and lower classes, and how the middle and lower classes find their opportunities limited to starving, becoming migrants or helping to force their fellows to make the same choice. It has lessons for history, economics, geography, science, any of the social studies.

But it isn't necessarily a great book for an English class. It has some wonderful passages, and indeed some beautiful chapters. Steinbeck used an alternating chapter format where he wrote a short chapter describing a facet of Depression-era life in a broad, imagery-filled way, using no real characters or plot. Then he'd go back to the Joad family and follow them as they ran into the same sorts of problems covered in the "artsy" chapter. The themes were there and clearly visible, but there weren't many, and they weren't complex. Finally, it had the weirdest little ending I've seen so far, and I'm still not sure what was going on with it, and I've showed it to a few people and reread it with them to no avail. It was nice, it was excellent to read, but it wasn't artistically challenging.

8/10