Every Writer's Writer

 A Review of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Back in college, I had a book of writing tips from renowned crime writer Elmore Leonard. It featured 10 sort of unconventional tips for writing fiction that I thought was interesting. Leonard admonished Steinbeck several times in the book, but almost always about his novel Sweet Thursday. It's been on my list for some time. 

Sweet Thursday is the post-war sequel to Steinbeck's earlier novel Cannery Row, which I didn't realize and so have never read. What's interesting is Steinbeck's acknowledged style change between the two novels. In the prologue to Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck features a fictional monologue from one of the characters Mac about the writing in Cannery Row: 

“I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

Steinbeck makes the transformation of his fiction a central part of the novel. The plot, a sort of mundane love story between an eccentric amateur marine biologist and a rough-edged wayfaring young lady helped along by a goofy cast of characters, takes a back seat to process. None of his characters or settings are given much description aside from a couple of chapters titled Hooptedoodle 1 and 2, but Steinbeck succeeds in crafting dialogue that carries a description of the character in the reader's head, which is hard to grasp while you're reading but once you catch that you're using queues from the dialogue to imagine what the character looks like, it's pretty impressive.

It's also interesting Cannery Row takes place prior to World War 2 and Sweet Thursday is after. Himself serving as a wartime correspondent in the UK, for Steinbeck, the nature of writing is forever changed. He doesn't put out another major work of fiction after Sweet Thursday. Steinbeck's main character Doc is non-fiction, academic writer, observing marine creatures and writing about their psychology. While all of the characters in the novel are adrift, it is Doc the writer who is in existential crisis.

Finding a whole cache of baby octopi Doc sets about the task of documenting their psychological condition under extreme stress. Spoiler alert: the octopi all die, leaving Doc unable to finish his paper and left to engage in the frivolities of the novel's love story. It's not hard to imagine Steinbeck himself struggling with the death of his various subjects and characters, torturing his writing style in uncharacteristic experimentation in form until throwing away the already aimless plot for an equally uncharacteristically uninteresting love story. 

 If Sweet Thursday is Steinbeck's crack at the postwar novel about adrift and listless characters looking for meaning it's almost as though he's speaking to his fellow writers. Welcoming them to the meaningless world of postwar fiction.