Of all the Ways in Which “The Grapes of Wrath” is Offensive, Nothing is More Offensive than Equating It with the Film “Boyhood” (Part I of II)
“The Grapes of Wrath” tells a story of an impoverished family moving from the East Coast to the West Coast in a car during the Great Depression.
It won the Nobel Prize for Literature and is considered by many to be the greatest American novel.
This fact is offensive to so many people in so many ways.
It’s offensive to America, which has certainly produced a greater novel.
It’s offensive to novels, which exist to entertain.
It’s offensive to book critics, many of whom have much better taste.
It’s offensive to the Nobel Prize, which should be given to something that has contributed to the betterment of humankind.
And above all, it’s offensive to readers, who have to suffer through more than 600 pages of utter, complete nonsense.
I hated this book more than any book I’ve read in the entire time I’ve spent on earth.
This book is bad in some incomparable ways.
For example, every other chapter is dedicated to pages and pages of description of sceneries. Nothing happens in those chapters because nothing happens with sceneries. Whether you read those chapters or not, or, for that matter, whether those chapters were written or not, it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in the narrative of the book.
Not that the narrative is much better.
The story revolves around a large family of parents, kids, and grandparents trying to find a better life during the Great Depression. I get it. The Great Depression was a terrible time. That’s something I knew before I read the book, and that’s something that was hammered home after 50 pages. Yet the book keeps on going and going (and going), endlessly, relentlessly, ad nauseam, for hundreds of pages more.
The book is so bad that John Steinbeck, who wrote this travesty for the suffering of generations to come, can’t even provide a coherent conclusion to his rambling. As I approached page 600, with only about 20 pages remaining, I had this deepening suspicion that I couldn’t tell where the story was going because Steinbeck didn’t know either. When that moment of suspicion was confirmed, it was one of the angriest moments of my life.
“The Grapes of Wrath” is the first–and to date, the only–book that I have read that does not improve upon the reading of the Federal Register for the same number of pages. Oh, I’ve read bad books before and after. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.*
* This witty paragraph is a tribute to the opening paragraph of the review of the movie “Mad Dog Time” from the Pulitzer-winning movie critic Roger Ebert.
(Continued to Part II)
