This novel is set in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression, on a street with many sardine canneries (hence the title). The story centres on the people living there, especially grocer Lee Chong, marine biologist Doc, Dora Flood, who runs a brothel, and Mac, the leader of a group of layabouts.
In the opening paragraph, Steinbeck describes Cannery Row as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream”, and also as “the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries and corrugated iron, honkytonks, restaurants and whorehouses, and little crowded groceries, laboratories and flophouses”. Its inhabitants could be termed “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons-of-bitches” but also “saints and angels and martyrs and holy men”.
Nearly everyone owes Lee Chong’s store money, but he doesn’t pursue his debts because he knows he’ll be paid eventually. Local women dislike brothel-owner Dora but she has paid people’s food bills and kept them from hunger during the Depression and contributes the most to the area’s charities. Kind and generous Doc (based on Steinbeck’s close friend Ed Ricketts), whose marine lab supplies all sorts of sea specimens, is universally loved. “Mack and the boys” are wasters, not above lying, cheating and swindling, but they generally mean well.
Steinbeck lived happily in the area from 1930 to 1941, until his marriage failed, then spent a traumatic time reporting on the US army’s Mediterranean campaign during the war, and returned home to where his second marriage was also in difficulty. In this deeply nostalgic novel, he tries to recapture the happy, innocent, carefree 1930s in Monterey, which were gone for ever. He recreates that world with wistful affection, lovingly describing landscapes and social interactions.
There’s lots of fun, with gags about food, sex and booze that have stood the test of time, but there’s also much sadness. Some characters take their own lives, and even the widely loved Doc is a lonely figure who drinks alone at night, listening to sad music.
His peculiar dietary habit of grating chocolate on to his frying sausages has stuck in my memory.
