Bill Slocum 2008-08-29
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Walking through middle school corridors, I'd spy kids in the grade above mine carrying John Steinbeck's "The Pearl" and think them lucky. Judging from the cover it was some kind of sea adventure, probably involving sharks and Jacqueline Bisset. This was back in the 1970s, and I was obviously confused.
Flash forward to the present. Feeling nostalgic, I decide to take the book on after years of wondering. It was certainly short, and Steinbeck is a classic writer, so it seemed a good idea.
A terse morality play about the pitfalls of materialism and the depravity of man, "The Pearl" is clearly a think piece rather than a conventional novel focused on characters and storyline. It made me think, too: However bad middle school was, it could have been worse.
Kino is a poor Mexican Indian who lives off the meager pearls he finds swimming for oysters in the Gulf. One day, desperate for a miracle as his infant son squirms from a scorpion bite, he finds the largest pearl anyone has ever seen, large as a gull's egg and jet black. Kino sees a brighter future for himself and his family, but the jealous villagers and the plutocratic pearl buyers conspire to keep him in his place.
"The pearl has become my soul", Kino tells his wife, who begs him to get rid of it before someone gets hurt. "If I give it up I shall lose my soul."
Steinbeck does nothing to make you care about Kino, his soul, or his wife and child, other than relate their poverty. They aren't people with personalities, but constructs designed to trot out points Steinbeck wants to make. Published in 1947, when socialism was fashionable and Steinbeck a recognized purveyor of the worker ideal, "The Pearl" might pass as a message about the folly of wealth and the value of living within one's means. Yet Kino and his family are clearly living below any decent standard. Collectivist comradeship may be the hallmark of socialist society, but the village Kino lives in is full of thieves and cheats.
As the novel moves slowly on to a finale obvious from the midpoint of the book, one wonders what Steinbeck is trying to say. "The Pearl" is not supposed to be just a story, it's so unsatisfying in that department its clear the Bard of Salinas had other fish to fry. But what?
You are left in the end not really knowing. As a classroom exercise, I guess it can provide some lively discussions if the teacher isn't too much of a tool. There's bits of good Steinbeck prose here and there, like his description of a watering hole where cats take their prey and lap water "through their bloody teeth" and the last image of the pearl itself, which captures a sense of otherworldly menace quite unexpected from this otherwise realist story. As an account of cruel nature, it works in a reductivist way.
But I can't see it as a "classic" in the same sense as other Steinbeck novels I've read. It's no "Grapes Of Wrath". Maybe because it's short it makes for a more popular scholastic reading assignment than "Grapes Of Wrath". But "The Pearl" is no easy read, nor is it satisfying.
