Cannery Row in Monterey, California, is a place of fish processing plants, a marine biology lab, a grocery shop and a brothel. Steinbeck describes some of the characters who live there, and the efforts of a group of semi-homeless people to organise a party for the marine biologist who runs the lab, and is regarded as a benefactor by most of the people who live on the street.

It reminded me of [b:Last Exit to Brooklyn|50275|Last Exit to Brooklyn|Hubert Selby Jr.|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1362815242s/50275.jpg|543352], which is written about the other side of the USA, and may have been inspired by [b:Cannery Row|4799|Cannery Row|John Steinbeck|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388188936s/4799.jpg|824028], but this one is much lighter, and there is more humour.

One thing I did find rather annoying, however, is that the edition I read was published in the UK, and the publishers had decided to use their own British house style for spelling and terminology. House style is all very well, but when it is obviously alien to the setting of the book it is distracting. So "curb" has been changed to "kerb" (or has it? Maybe Americans in general, or Steingback in particular, spelt it that way in the 1930s). It made me pause and wonder what other liberties the publishers had taken with the text. Would a bunch of down-and-outs living in California in the 1930s really have filled a truck with petrol? Or would they rather have used gasoline? Or did Americans actually speak of petrol back then, and is gasoline thus a more recent innovation?

In some books this might not be so important, but [b:Cannery Row|4799|Cannery Row|John Steinbeck|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388188936s/4799.jpg|824028] is mainly about the place and the people who live in it -- the plot is pretty sketchy. So inauthentic dialogue is a distraction for the reader.