My favorite present was when I was 15 or 16. A Christmas. There were clothes and things. But my brother wrapped two paperback books for me: The Catcher in the Rye and The Grapes of Wrath. Two days later I was an addict.I was also a completist. Down went the other Salingers quickly. And Steinbeck? Well, he was God. I had read maybe a dozen or more of his books before Travels with Charley and I had my moment of doubt. What kind of man owns a poodle?And so there was a hiatus, if you can call forty years a 'hiatus'. What would an old favorite be like after all these years?_____ _____ _____ _____Unlikeable people are at a crossroads, figuratively in their lives, and literally at Rebel Corners, an American crossroads where you have to be if you want to go somewhere else. It's a 1950's movie, just before color. The players are of a type, but they don't wear well now, oddly more dated than Dickens.Maybe like Vonnegut, you have to read Steinbeck at a certain age of life._____ _____ _____ _____I'll retell the Pancho Villa story:"He used to tell one about Pancho Villa. He said a poor woman came to Villa and said 'You have shot my husband and now I and the little ones will starve.' Well, Villa had plenty of money then. He had the presses and he was printing his own. He turned to his treasurer and said, 'Roll out five kilos of twenty-peso bills for this poor woman.' He wasn't even counting it, he had so much. So they did and they tied the bills together with wire and that woman went out. Well, then a sergeant said to Villa, 'There was a mistake, my general. We did not shoot that woman's husband. He got drunk and we put him in jail.' Then Pancho Villa said, 'Go immediately and shoot him. We cannot disappoint that poor woman.'"_____ _____ _____ _____A husband and wife are artificially polite. A hired hand is ravaged by pimples and desire. A waitress has Hollywood dreams. A daughter hides a life as other lives are hidden from her. A malcontent. A returning veteran. A woman with a fake name and easy way about her that changes every man aboard. Alice stays behind and goes all Elizabeth Taylor drunk (although Joan Collins plays her in the movie). And her husband Juan, Mexican and Irish, drives the bus, a heathen making bets with a plastic Virgin of Guadalupe, to flee or stay. _____ _____ _____ _____One of the passengers, Norma, came to the defense of 'Camille'."I hit him," she said. "I hit him because he said you were a tramp."Camille looked quickly away. She stared across the valley where the last of the sun was disappearing behind the mountains and she rubbed her cheek with her hand. Her eyes were dull. And she forced them to take on life and she forced them to smile and she gave the smile to Norma."Look, kid," she said. You'll just have to believe this until you find out for yourself -- everybody's a tramp some time or other. Everybody. And the worst tramps of all are the ones that call it something else."_____ _____ _____ _____We get tossed together. We act. We get by, but we're plagued with doubts and dreams. Some know; some never will. Some lie to others; some to ourselves. It's bleak, a black and white film. Memorable. Read it before it turns sepia.
For my third Steinbeck, I chose The Wayward Bus. This is an interesting--though not particularly charming--story of disgruntled individuals brought together by a seemingly-never-ending bus ride. While the book technically revolves around a bus ride, the focus of the story is more on the waywardness of the people. How each of Steinbeck's characters are unhappy each in their own way. The book examines humanity--up, close, and a bit too personal. Each character is distinct in that they all have their own issues, own back stories, own hopes and dreams. All are on the bus for different reasons. All are on different journeys. But they're all similar in that they are all dissatisfied with their lives. No one is living their dream life. No one is happy with what they have. All want something more, something better. Some are unhappy with themselves. Some are unhappy with their circumstances. Some just want to escape and start anew. A few just want to hear themselves talk. Some long for freedom. Some long for love. Some long for fame. Some just long for different--they're bored with the sameness of their life.Who are the characters? There are Juan and Alice Chicoy, a miserably unhappy married couple. Juan is the bus driver. Alice runs the diner part of the gas station. Pimples "Kit" Carson. A young teenage hormone-driven boy. Norma, a mousy waitress with delusions of grandeur--her obsession of choice? Clark Gable. These four live and work at Rebel Corners. (Alice is not along for the trip. She's back home enjoying her solitude.) The passengers include a family of three on their way to Mexico--businessman, frigid wife, rebellious and lusty daughter, a traveling salesman, a tramp of a lady traveling under a false name, an old man who complains day in and day out who can't agree with anyone about anything. I think that about covers it. Unless I missed one or two silent ones.The bus ties them all together. They're all on their way to somewhere else. But there are delays caused by weather and road conditions.What is the book about? Love. Hate. Lust. Anger. Disappointment. Bitterness. Frustration. Insecurity. Addiction. Ambition. The book can almost be read as a series of vignettes. If you're a reader intrigued by humanity--if you read books for their insight on the human condition or the human psyche--then this one might be right for you. It's also an interesting snapshot of the times in which it was written. I think it would take another reading for me to fully get everything the book was trying to capture.
What do You think about The Wayward Bus (2006)?
steinbeck pulverizes me. i'm not the type to get choked up by calling-card commercials or whose heart swells with the violins at the end of a sappy movie, but steinbeck has a heart-seeking missile aimed directly at me, and he knows just how to find my emotional center. this has always been my favorite of steinbeck's works, even though it is a shortish one in which very little actually happens. but steinbeck's strength, for me, has always been his characters, and this is one prolonged character study of people in transition - hoping to move on, but unlikely to ever change their ways or make any staggering improvements in their lives. bring me your poor, your tired, your unlovable and i will make you love them; this is the foundation for any steinbeck novel. his instinct is to celebrate these characters, with their flawed dignity and big dreams. having read this myself in high school, living out my own small-town blues experience (although hopefully more lovable than some of these people), steinbeck was a discovery for me about the spirit of america. nobody does it better, or in a way that encapsulates more of the emotional landscape of this country than steinbeck does. how can someone feel trapped in a country this big, with all its possibilities? but that's the tragic irony of desperate humanity; so much cake to eat, but you ain't going nowhere.
—karen
This is a gem in which a small cast of characters, soon to be passengers on a brief bus trip, are portrayed with brutal honesty, in all their ugliness and all-too-fleeting moments of beauty. These people have the thinnest layers of veneer over their savagery, which are cracked open once the bus is stranded for just a few hours, and are barely smoothed over once they think they are again civilization-bound. The honesty of some of the players makes them much worse human beings, but in other cases it improves or at least strengthens them. There is no answer to the cliff side calls to "REPENT", but hopefully the bit of self-revelation may make a few of them less toxic to the world at large. Steinbeck reserves most of his affection for the countryside, with its wildflowers, rivers, valleys painted in loving strokes of his brush.
—Betsy
I'm rarely disappointed by Steinbeck's novels, and this, his next published work after Grapes of Wrath, was no exception.The narrative follows a bus journey through California taken over a single day by a group of passengers including a company director and his wife and daughter, a travelling salesman, a stripper, a cantankerous old man, as well as two employees of the bus driver, Juan Chicoy. Having already been forced to spend the night in Chicoy's service station following mechanical issues with the bus, and rain creating further problems on the route, the characters, firstly in the service station and then in the confines of the bus, contemplate their situation both in the here and now and in their life in general, with interesting results.I've loved the characters that Steinbeck has created in other novels, and similarly found the rag tag bunch created here just as entertaining and interesting. I admired the way that, in each chapter, Steinbeck was able to recount the internal monologue of a character in one paragraph, then was able to move seamlessly into another character's conversation or a poetic description of the surroundings. The characters were believable, and must've been slightly risqué for 1947, when the novel was published.I'm determined over the next few months to read more of Steinbeck's lesser known works. All being well, they'll all be as enjoyable as this one.
—Allan
