Cannery Row

by John Steinbeck

In the din and stink that is Cannery Row a colourful blend of misfits - gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists - survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Lee Chong, the astute owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also the proprietor of the Palace Flophouse that Mack and his troupe of good-natured 'boys' call home. Dora runs the brothel with clockwork efficiency and a generous heart, and Doc is the fount of all wisdom. Packed with invention and joie de vivre CANNERY ROW is Steinbeck's high-spirited tribute to his native California.

• ISBN10: 1417671858
• ISBN13: 9781417671854
• Publish Date: 1 February 2002 (first published 1 January 1960)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 13 September 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Turtleback Books
• Edition: Turtleback School & Library, C ed.
• Format: Hardcover (Library Binding)
• Pages: 181
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

I watched the film version of On the Road the other night, and while watching it I couldn’t help but compare Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarity and their fellow beats to the inhabitants of Cannery Row, more specifically Mack and the boys from the Palace Flophouse.

That is, there aren’t that many similarities but it struck me that both books deal with the stories of characters who have an innate longing for freedom, individuality and a break away from conventional society. Both are written with a pinch of nostalgia for road trips.

So, thinking about this for a couple of days I made the following observations:

The inhabitants of Cannery are pretty nice people. They just want to mind their own business and get on with their day. They might not all subscribe to the same interpretation of morality, but they all seem to be pretty decent people – if anyone is taken advantage of this is with their knowledge and consent and generally in the genuine spirit of everyone having a right to be a chancer.
The whole point of the story of Cannery Row is for Mack and the boys to do something nice for Doc – and even when not everything goes as planned everyone still displays a sense of good will.

By contrast, Sal and Dean in On the Road lack the concern for others and instead are mostly concerned with pursuing their own pleasure seeking interests. Many of which invariably seem to result in sponging off other people – be it Sal’s aunt, their friends, wives, girlfriends, whoever.

I first read and adored On the Road in my teens , when the ideas of road trips seems pretty cool and the defying defined roles seemed something to aspire to. I would not say that picking up Steinbeck’s novels in the years since that first reading On the Road changed that perception completely. I still love road trips! However, I’d much rather hang out or collect frogs with the inhabitants of Cannery Row. And let’s face it, their parties sound much more fun than the ones Sal and Dean end up in.

[jamiereadthis]

Blown away. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t anything like this: a veritable little shantytown of stories so flat out fantastic and bursting with rascals and joy that the title page might as well have called me out by name, saying, Psst, here, you’re going to love this forever. Steinbeck does what he promises on the first page, “to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.” Doc and Mack and the boys, spinning in their orbits, completely stole my heart.

“Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”