Cannery Row is Steinbeck at his best; a lean tragic-comic novel brimming with irony and rich memorable characters. It's a novel about the loneliness that people experience, even when surrounded by a community like Cannery Row.
Cannery Row is a world mired in poverty and this novel reminded me of how this time in American history was both brutally callus and yet strangely innocent. People were left to fend for themselves and sink or swim on their own. People were happy to have an old unused boiler that they could crawl into and call their home.
Cannery Row has a simple plot. It's largely a series of vignettes held together loosely by the main story of Mack and the Boys, a motley crew who employ smooth talk, light fingers and an occasional honest day's work to get by, and their plan to give a party for Doc, a marine biologist with a lab on Cannery Row who acts as a surrogate parent of sorts for the community.
Steinbeck has a tendency to be a little heavy handed with the themes in his novels but his touch is lighter here. The characters of Cannery Row are fully realized, flawed human beings that will linger with you long after you've finished the novel. Steinbeck does an excellent job of infusing this novel with both humor and pathos. I prefer Steinbeck's shorter works to his longer novels and consider Cannery Row to be the author's second best (Of Mice and Men being my favorite). 4.5 stars.
Get more detail about Cannery Row (Camden).
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