A boy in the valley of The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck is enormous, nearly silent, and can draw any animal he has seen from memory onto a schoolroom blackboard with absolute accuracy. He is also convinced that there are people living underground, and he digs at night to reach them. A neighbour, meaning well, reports the digging. Within a fortnight he is committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, and the man who reported it goes home satisfied he did the responsible thing.
The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck runs that pattern twelve times, with variations, and never once supplies a villain.
The Valley in The Pastures of Heaven Is the Joke
The opening is a short prologue and it establishes the terms with some cruelty.
A Spanish corporal, hunting escaped Indian labourers, comes over a rise and finds the valley. Off comes the steel hat, and he gives the place its name: these, he says, are the pastures of heaven the Lord leads us to. He plans to come back one day, build an adobe house, keep cattle, live quietly. He then catches smallpox from a woman, and when his face starts falling away his friends shut him in a barn to keep the infection off themselves, where he dies.
Everything after that is a repetition. People arrive wanting peace. The land is genuinely superb, well watered, the best fruit in central California. And one by one, every family in it is undone.
The Munroes of The Pastures of Heaven Are Not a Curse
A group will want to work out what the mechanism actually is, because the book offers a supernatural explanation early and then quietly withdraws it.
The valley believes the old Battle farm is cursed, and when Bert Munroe buys it and moves his family in, the neighbours wait for something to happen to him. Nothing does. The Munroes thrive. What happens instead is that a Munroe turns up at the edge of each subsequent story and somebody else’s life comes apart.
The point to put to a table is that they are never malicious. The damage is always done through friendliness: a casual schoolyard remark, a piece of advice, a charitable impulse, a question asked in the wrong company. Bert Munroe is a pleasant, sociable, entirely unremarkable man who ends the book with no idea he has done anything at all.
The valley is full of people who have organised their lives around not being examined. The Munroes examine them, kindly, and that is sufficient.
Junius Maltby Is the Story to Argue About
If a group reads only one chapter of The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck closely, make it this one.
Maltby is a clerk with weak lungs who marries a widow with a farm, and then does almost nothing for years. He sits with his feet in the stream and reads. When fever comes through the house his wife and both stepsons die, and the neighbours circulate the story that he was reading by the water while they went. The book quietly corrects this: he did not know they were ill, and afterwards he went from bed to bed talking nonsense, explaining to one dying boy how diamonds are made.
He raises the surviving child in deliberate poverty and perfect happiness, barefoot and extremely well read. The valley decides this is neglect. The women take up a collection, buy the boy proper clothes, and the story ends with Maltby leaving the valley because he has finally been made to feel ashamed.
Nobody in that chapter does anything wrong by their own lights. That is the whole of The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck in one episode.
Where It Falls Short
Worth saying before you assign The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck:
- Once the pattern is visible, several later chapters lose their tension because the reader is simply waiting for the Munroe to appear.
- The quality is uneven. Maltby and the schoolboy chapter are first-rate; two in the middle are anecdotes given an ending.
- Some of the women exist only to be ruined, though Molly Morgan and Helen Van Deventer are exceptions.
- The haunted-farm premise is raised with some care and then dropped without comment.
The Pastures of Heaven Aims Its Ending at the Reader
The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck closes by leaving the valley entirely and climbing the ridge, where a sightseeing bus has stopped so passengers can look down.
Every one of them lands on the same fantasy. Somewhere down there a person could run a cow, a couple of pigs, grow what he needed. One of them wants the quiet for thinking: he has loose ends he would like to gather into something with a shape to it. The driver, who stops here daily, says he always likes to imagine how quiet and easy a man could live.
It is precisely what the Spanish corporal said on page one, and what every ruined family in between believed when they arrived. The passengers are not told. The bus pulls away.
For a novel published in 1932 by a writer of thirty, that is an unusually confident piece of construction, and it is the reason the book outlasts its reputation as early work.
Reading It With the Rest
The obvious pairing is Cannery Row, the other mosaic of one small place, written thirteen years later with all the cruelty removed. To a God Unknown comes from the same period and treats a Californian valley as a living thing with intentions. For the mature version of the land-and-inheritance material, our analysis of East of Eden is the place to go. The real valley behind the book is Corral de Tierra, a short drive from Salinas.
Molly Morgan Gets the Only Escape
One chapter of The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck ends differently from the rest, and a group should notice it.
Molly Morgan arrives as the new schoolteacher, carrying her own suitcase up the dirt road because nobody came to meet her. She is capable, liked, and the single person in the book who is building something in the valley rather than hiding in it.
She also has a father who disappeared years ago, a charming drunk who used to come home with presents and stories and then stop coming home at all. And she has kept him as a story she tells herself. When she realises that a shiftless hired man working on a nearby ranch may be him, she does not investigate. She resigns her post and leaves the valley the same week.
It is the only departure in The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck that is chosen rather than inflicted, and she buys it by refusing to find out something true. Whether that counts as an escape is an argument worth having.
Questions for the Table
- Is anybody in this book responsible for anything?
- Should Maltby have been left alone, and what would that have cost his son?
- Why does Steinbeck raise the curse and then abandon it?
- The bus passengers see a paradise. Are they wrong?
- Would the valley have destroyed these families without the Munroes?
Content notes
Child death, death in childbirth, the committal of a disabled young man, and a suicide.
Where It Leaves You
With the uncomfortable suspicion that most harm is done by people being nice.
The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck has no cruelty in it anywhere, no antagonist, and a body count. Everyone who destroys somebody else does it while being helpful, and goes home pleased. The valley keeps its reputation as the best land in the county, and the next family arrives wanting a quiet life.