BOOKS
LONG AFTER EDEN
EAST OF EDEN . By John Steinbeck. Viking. $4.50.
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. By Ernest Hemingwoy. Scribner's. $3.00.
MEN AT ARMS. By Evelyn Wough. Little, Brown. $3.00.
HEMLOCK AND AFTER. By Angus Wilson. Vi king. $3.00.
TESTIMONIES, By Potrick O'Brion. Horcourt, Brllce. $3.00.
The heroine of John Steinbeck's new novel makes Lady
Macbeth seem like a naughty girl and Lizzie Borden a half-hearted
dilettante. She drives one of her high school teachers to suicide; she
insults her first protector, a prudent man, with such exact brutality in a
few offhand sentences that he almost beats her to death ; she commits
arson, theft and murder with the ease and aplomb of someone eating
a sandwich; she sleeps with her brother-in-law on her wedding night,
departs from her husband soon after giving birth to twins (the twins,
the reader feels by now, are merely another of her spiteful exaggera–
tions), establishes herself in a house of prostitution, poisons the madam
who loves her as a daughter, and in short displays the most relentless
and sustained pursuit of evil for evil's sake to be found in literature
apart from Suetonius and the Marquis de Sade, none of whose celebrities
come close to Steinbeck's charmer, since they are sometimes compromised
by the gleam of a motive, while she is absolutely remarkable in the
gratuitous and unmotivated character of her behavior, and equally
remarkable for the lack of passion and excitement with which she
usually goes to work. There is much else in the novel, which is the story
of three generations, but the heroine quite naturally dominates the book
and leaves the reader in such a state of dazzled numbness that all the
other characters seem humdrum, slow-moving and lacking in imagina–
tion. The crux of the book appears to be the necessity that Adam, the
lady's husband, recognize the existence of pure unmixed evil and
identify his unequivocal wife as an embodiment of it. The truth
is
that
the extraordinary amount of effort, experience, suffering and destruc–
tion needed to persuade the husband that his wife is indeed a monster
suggests the novelist's estrangement from a genuine sense of good and
evil. There can hardly be any other explanation of Steinbeck's systematic,
unrelieved, entirely incredible caricature of villainy. In one of the many
