BOOK REVIEW: Cannery Row – Reviewed by Sallie Brosnan
PHOTO BY ALEIGHSA WRIGHT
Sallie is a Panama City native, a graduate of Bay High School and the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. She is currently employed with AVIAN, Inc. as a technical writer for NSWC PCD. She is a board member of the Bay County Public Library Foundation. Sallie has been a Steinbeck enthusiast since first reading “Cannery Row.” She recently visited Monterey to retrace the steps of Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, the real-life inspiration for her favorite story. Sallie and her husband Sean are the proud parents of a fluffy, blackand-white terrier-ollie rescue named Mr. Watson.
REVIEW
When I was 22, my dad placed a copy of John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” in my hands. He believed the story would resonate with me, and he was right. I was hooked from its opening paragraph. The characters became real because Steinbeck described the rich, varied, and unique nature of Monterey and its inhabitants. I love “Cannery Row” because Steinbeck celebrated the sad, the eccentric, the odd. He gave the ordinary Monterey citizen a place in history.
“Cannery Row” is a celebration of the common man, the haunts of a small town in Depression-era California, and the stories that come from handling life’s ups and downs. Written in 1945, it paints a picture of a small stretch of coastal California. Monterey looks nothing like it did back then and without Steinbeck’s account, we would not know of the stench from motor oil and sardines. We could not close our eyes and imagine the conversations among Chinese-Americans who abandoned their home and culture to profit from sardine fishing in America.
Monterey may have merely been a backdrop. The real-life characters are the story’s crown jewel. Protagonist “Doc” bears a striking resemblance to Steinbeck’s good friend, confidant, and all-around good guy, Ed Ricketts. Ricketts lived in an old shack on Cannery Row that doubled as bachelor pad and laboratory. On the top floor, Ricketts entertained guests, held raucous parties, and served as the community’s lay psychiatrist. On the lower level, Ricketts studied and preserved marine specimens. Ricketts was the lifeblood of the community, and Steinbeck immortalized him in this time capsule of a tale.
Doc, both plagued and intrigued by a rag-tag group of simplistic men called “Mack and the boys,” lived in an old fish-meal warehouse eloquently named “The Palace Flophouse.” They were well-versed in great planning after nights of great drinking and remind the reader to cherish friendship and handle adversity over a good night’s sleep. Gone are the days of Mack and the boys being able to trade captured frogs at Lee Chong’s Grocery for a can of beans and a quart of “Old Tennis Shoes” (Tennessee whiskey), but “Cannery Row” helps us remember what once was.
During Steinbeck’s life, he was misunderstood and labeled “communist” for journaling stories like that of the “harvest gypsies,” orchard workers involved in the bloody strikes during the Great Depression. As a scientist and journalist, the way he observed and recorded plankton under a microscope is similar to his journaling of sardine fisherman hauling in their daily catch.
When I recently toured Ed Ricketts’ lab, Pacific Biological Laboratories, the tour guide encouraged us to go home and find the Ed Ricketts of our community. He charged us to shine light on those who make our communities extraordinary—those everyday heroes whose superpowers are thoughtfulness, generosity, and selflessness. This is why I love Steinbeck, and this is why I have been changed by his work. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”