This was Steinbeck's last novel, in the sense that the fiction that was published after was a piece of juvenalia. It comes after The Short Reign of Pippin IV, a really tedious satire, and Sweet Thursday, a mechanical romantic comedy sequel to the great Cannery Row, so when Steinbeck published this it had been ten years since he wrote anything worthile with East of Eden.

This novel is about a store clerk in America at a time of moral degredation and it might be said to reflect a particular trend in postwar American fiction where a lot of the procedures associated with modernism become part of the medium, via the Beats. At least I assume this is where Steinbeck's getting it from; he was alive in the thirties and everything about his previous works - the realism, the humanism, the earnestness - would indicate to me that he was keeping a studied distance from all that. In my opinion there's no literary style that has aged worse and whether dialogue or prose there's redundant and repetitive rhyming non-sequiturs, as well as some Jung, everywhere you look here, which is all to say there's none of the sentimental folksiness I go to Steinbeck for.