O yeah...and this is plagarized

The book certainly has ambition to spare. Steinbeck wrote it as a partly autobiographical retelling of the Book of Genesis, and the book's central concern is with the pitting of good versus evil, both between individuals and within the human heart. After inheriting a fortune from his father, Adam Trask leaves behind an awkward relationship with his brother and heads west to the Salinas Valley in northern California to set up a farm. Adam's an upstanding type, if a little obtuse, particularly as a judge of character. His new bride Cathy is a wicked ex-prostitute but no one sent Adam the memo. “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents,” Steinbeck writes in the novel. “Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places…And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?” That's Cathy, and according to some accounts, Steinbeck based the character on an ex-wife. Yow.

Cathy gives birth to a pair of twin boys but she's not one for domesticity, and she abandons her newborns and her home to go work at a whorehouse again, but not before shooting Adam in the shoulder. Adam survives, but he's still entranced by his wife and for the rest of the novel, he and his sons try to come to terms with Cathy's raw evil.

If Cathy seems like a bit of a cardboard cutout, she is. But the story is written in mythic proportions so it's forgivable. What's not is that every single character has that feeling of stiffness, as if they're only puppets for Steinbeck's big, yet very little, ideas on the meaning of life. One sideline figure, Lee, is a Chinese immigrant working as a servant for Adam and his sons. When Lee first enters the book, he delivers lines like, “Me talkee Chinese talk.” But soon enough, we learn that he's more literate in his English than anyone in the family, and he starts spouting pseudo-Confucian platitudes on every page.

In fact, throughout the entire book, there's a strange background noise, as if you can hear the gears in Steinbeck's head turning and straining, trying to indoctrinate you into his world view, which he waits until page 411 to throttle you with. But by then, you've already seen this coming and it feels less like revelation than an uninteresting journal entry copied and pasted into a novel:

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. … There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

And that's the Oprah moment. The payoff. Suddenly, Steinbeck is the spiritual guru who shows up for a few episodes and soon has a spin-off show of his own. And his lesson to us today is that we always have a choice to do good or evil, and that it's up to us to take responsibility for those decisions. It's a tidy enough statement, and it could have been its own article in the Oprah magazine (which is sprinkled this month with other wise one-liners from big names like Emily Dickinson, Emerson, and Oprah's “new friend Salma Hayak”).

East of Eden, interestingly enough, was panned by critics when it was published more than 50 years ago, but loved by the public which bought it in droves and made it a number-one bestseller. And even though Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, his reputation is still under dispute among those who debate these things (Slate's Chris Suellentrop wrote an instructive piece this summer on the topic). But don't think Oprah doesn't know all of this. “There are some who would argue that this is not really a `classic,'” she said in an interview this summer. “And I realized that that was a conversation that would come up over and over again. I just want to read great books without it becoming controversial.”

But East of Eden isn't a great read, and that's a shame because there is no shortage of classics that have been better-received and that can consume your every waking (and usually sleeping) minute they're so good. And you certainly don't need a special pass, like a degree in English, to appreciate them. The trouble with rubber-stamping a mediocre novel a “classic,” particularly when the audience is the uninitiated sort, is that it doesn't leave much room for readers to make independent critical judgments. To Oprah's credit, she finds room in the new book club section of her website to acknowledge East of Eden's uneasy status among critics. But there's also an area online called “Write a book review,” a kind of glorified online discussion board, in which a brave few have admitted to not liking the novel as much as they had hoped, only to be berated by other readers who instruct them to be more patient if they want to “get” the book and uncover all its hidden layers.

Along with the Oprah seal that's printed on the book's wraparound label, there should be a disclaimer that says it's okay to not find some deeper meaning in the text or to not fill your copy with marginalia on all the biblical allusions. If widespread smarter reading is the goal, we don't want a mass of people trying to draw blood from stones. Oprah's on the right track: she's sensitive to people's apprehension of heavy books you only read in school, and she's pitching her voice at all the right soothing tones. She might want to give her fans a little more credit, though, and next time feed them something that really cracks the world of literature open for them, not because it's “like a movie” or has sex in it, but because it's too masterful to do anything else.

Now that, to borrow a word from the Oprah parlance, would be empowering.