Doc goes out to the Great Tide Pool to collect specimens and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck stops to watch. Starfish settle over mussels, fix a million suckers and lift until the shell gives. Crabs move between fronds of algae. Nudibranchs slide across rock with their skirts waving. For a page and a half there are no people at all, and when the human business resumes it has been quietly reframed: this street is also a tidal basin, and the men on it are also animals feeding and breeding in a small bounded place.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck was published in 1945, immediately after his return from covering the war in Europe, and it is the warmest thing he ever wrote. Whether that warmth is wisdom or evasion is the argument the book leaves behind.
Cannery Row Has No Plot and Says So
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck runs to thirty-two short chapters covering one block of sardine canneries in Monterey. Lee Chong keeps the grocery and everyone’s debt. Dora Flood runs the Bear Flag, which is a brothel conducted with the decorum of a parish council. Doc runs a biological supply laboratory across the street. Mack and four other men occupy a shed they have named the Palace Flophouse and do no work that anybody has asked for.
Such plot as exists is that Mack decides Doc deserves a party, and the first attempt destroys the laboratory while Doc is away. The second half is the second attempt. That is all.
The opening sentence sets the terms honestly, calling the street a poem and a stink and a grating noise in the same breath. A few lines later Steinbeck quotes an unnamed man describing the inhabitants as “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches”, then offers the alternative: “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men”, adding that he would have meant the same thing. The whole book is contained in that joke, and the joke is also the book’s limitation. It has decided in advance that the two descriptions are equivalent, and it never puts the proposition under any pressure.
Doc Is the Reason Cannery Row Works
The novel survives its own looseness because of one character. Doc is generous, solitary, faintly melancholy, and written without a shred of sentimentality despite being the object of everyone else’s. He is also the only person given an interior.
The model was Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist and the person Steinbeck was closest to for most of his adult life, which accounts for the specificity. The scenes of him working, labelling specimen bottles, wading in Monterey Bay at low tide, have a precision the rest of the book does not attempt.
The best thing in Cannery Row by John Steinbeck is a scene where nothing is resolved. A boy called Frankie, eleven and unwanted, has attached himself to the laboratory over weeks, standing outside the door, then inside it, then finally touching the workbench. Later he hides under a pile of excelsior and whimpers, and Doc listens from the stairs and goes quietly back up, because there is nothing in the world he can do. The novel does not fix Frankie. It does not use him to teach Doc anything. It just puts the two of them in a building together and leaves.
The Argument About Its Kindness
Here is where a group reading Cannery Row by John Steinbeck will divide, and it is worth letting it.
Two thirds of the way through Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, Doc is given a speech about how the qualities people admire, generosity and honesty and feeling, are precisely the ones that guarantee failure, while the qualities that succeed are the ones everybody claims to despise. It is a good speech. It is also the novel’s thesis delivered without opposition, by its most sympathetic character, roughly two thirds of the way through.
Nobody in the book is permitted to make the counter-case. Mack and the boys steal, sponge, wreck a man’s livelihood on a whim and are forgiven within fifty pages. Poverty is never frightening here. Nobody goes hungry in a way that hurts, nobody gets ill without a comic resolution, and the economic machinery that made the author’s previous decade so angry has been switched off.
A reader coming from the Dust Bowl novels will notice this immediately, and it is fair to call it a failure of nerve. It is also possible to read it as deliberate: a man who had just watched Europe burn writing a book in which the worst thing that happens is a broken window. Both readings hold. Neither is settled by the text.
The reservations worth raising at a meeting:
- The women of the Bear Flag are treated with affection and given no inner life whatsoever, which in a book this attentive to everyone else is a conspicuous absence.
- The Chinese characters, Lee Chong especially, are introduced through caricature that has aged badly even by 1945 standards.
- The vignette structure of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck means several chapters could be removed without anyone noticing, and a few of them should have been.
- The second party resolves nothing except the plot, and the book knows it, which makes the ending feel like a shrug dressed as an ending.
What the Structure of Cannery Row Is Doing
Set the complaints aside for a moment and the design is cleverer than it looks. Between the Mack chapters, Steinbeck drops in short pieces about people who never return: the history of Lee Chong’s Model T through three previous owners, a painter building a boat he will never put in the water, gophers dragging flowers down into their holes at first light.
None of it advances anything. All of it builds the street as a single organism, which is the real project of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, which is exactly what the tide pool chapters have already taught the reader to see. By the time the second party arrives, the reader is not following a story. They are watching a habitat, which is what the book has been asking for from its first paragraph.
Readers who want more of this should go to Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck’s return to the same street nine years later and after Ricketts had died, where the affection curdles into something more strained. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck also pairs usefully with our analysis of East of Eden, which shows how much architecture he could build when he wanted to, and with Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi for anyone who liked the short-chapter mosaic more than the subject.
Where It Leaves You
With a morning. Near the end there is a passage about dawn on the Row: sea lions calling from the rocks near the marine station, Lee Chong carrying the bins to the kerb, and a woman from the Bear Flag coming back from a late call, her face no longer holding its powder, walking carefully because her feet hurt.
One sentence is all she gets, and no verdict with it. Steinbeck sets her between the bins and the cool air as though she were part of the morning. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck is at its finest in those few paragraphs, where it stops arguing that these lives are beautiful and simply records them. The argument is the weakest thing in the book. The looking is the best thing he ever did.