the grapes of wrath

It's a bible for a world built by people—people in pursuit of profit—and the perverse evil they wreak. It's a book about people's alienation from land and food, about the enraging paradoxes of the market, about rotting cornucopias, about hunger. 

The book gets you on an especially basic, brutal level because the Joads are farmers. To survive, they really just want a piece of land out of which things can grow, and they can pretty much take it from there. They won't starve to death, at any rate. But after they get kicked off their patch, stuff gets heartbreakingly absurd.

There are descriptions of farmers secretly cultivating little patches of land hidden amidst the weeds of someone's fallow property. These people want to sink their teeth into the planet in the most basic, productive way. To "pray and curse" over a little patch of land, to have a livelihood as a literal livelihood! And they can't. 

In Of Mice and Men it's Lenny and George's little fantasy: self sufficiency, living off "the fatta the lan'." There's never a prayer of working up a "stake" in Grapes; fantasies of private ownership give way to collectivist longings, and tragic personal idiosyncrasies (looking at you, Lenny) to a vision of structural injustice. In the government camp there's aborted talk of a glorious field they could all share in. 

What does it say about a book if it makes you cry? Steinbeck was trying to, the intro quotes him as wanting to "tear the reader's nerves to rags" or something. but is that reasonable? does that betray some sloppy, melodramatic falsity about it? probably a bit, but then you'd be taking the little picture. no, i wouldn't have wept hanging out with the joads. but does their situation, the real plight of all these migrants, not make you sad as shit? it ought to. 

tom jr and ma are unreasonably perfect people. but that's only fair; it's a way of disappearing them so that one can better examine the forces acting on them. people that immaculate are less complicated, have less of an interior life to obfuscate that which is done to them. and this book is about that which is done to them.