Review: Tortilla Flat

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Lessons in degeneracy.

This is the third published novel of John Steinbeck. The first two were A Cup of Gold and To A God Unknown. I finished reading To A God Unknown the same day I finished reading this one. I read A Cup of Gold years ago and did not love it but did notice a few passages that were remarkable well-written.

Tortilla Flat is written as a series of short stories about a group of friends having "adventures" of a degenerate nature.

About Tortilla Flat -- I didn't enjoy reading it. There are several reasons why.

1. The characters are drunken thieves, supposedly with big hearts, who manage to always put their love of alcohol first. To this end they will steal to get the money to drink. If they have consciences, they are deeply buried and hard to access most of the time.

2. They are paisanos, a Spanish word that means "countrymen." In the context of this book they are descendants of the Californios... Spanish people who lived in California before the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846. There's nothing wrong with that, but the way they are characterized in this book, as drunken thieves and hustlers, seems to me to tend toward racism. Of course John Steinbeck was not one of these paisanos - he was of German, English and Irish descent according to Wikipedia. This was long before the "own voices" literary movement so.. it could be that Steinbeck was just trying to characterize the paisano culture that he encountered in California, but to me it came off as excessively sad, pathetic, and degenerate.

3. The novel focuses on things that might be of interest to a young man. Steinbeck was a young man when he wrote this book. He was 33 when it was published. As I am an old lady when reading this I'm not nearly so interested in drinking, stealing, and young men sleeping with whatever woman might be willing to allow it. Let's just say I can't identify with things the characters cared about.

I am seriously surprised this book ever got published but at the time it was his first exceptionally popular novel. It was published in 1935. Maybe it was just the thing the people of the world were waiting to read at that time. Who knows? I'm old, but not that old. My mom was 4 years old in 1935.

I've read a lot of Steinbeck novels, long and short. Of course his writing got much better as he aged and developed his writing skills. There are still a few I either haven't read, or that I don't remember reading. Of the two I finished reading today, this one and To A God Unknown - I much preferred To A God Unknown. I just wasn't amused by or interested much in Tortilla Flat. But to each their own. I see by the reviews that some people thought it was top-notch literature.



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