Beautiful Losers

We are told that God helps those who help themselves. Had the Joad family not been so busy trying to stay alive, they might have taken exception.

The Joads, one of thousands of families forced off their land by the Dust Bowl, try to play by the rules. They're hospitable to those in need and courteous to strangers. Under unimaginably difficult circumstances, they struggle to hold on to their dignity. Accepting charity is the ultimate defeat.

Their reward? Against their will, the Joads are turned into contestants in a perverse version of Survivor: one by one they succumb to the physical and emotional stress caused by exile and poverty. Will the Joad family survive? John Steinbeck doesn't tell us, but he does leave some disturbing hints.

The Grapes of Wrath is an unabashedly political book. From the title onward, it makes a thinly veiled threat: unless businessmen stop artificially depressing wages and prodding the local authorities to punish labor organizers, working people will take violent revenge. But Steinbeck pulls his punches enough to make the novel beautiful as well as powerful. It's not just another left-wing screed from the poisoned, polarized Thirties.

In addition to agribusiness, Steinbeck's list of villains includes banks and, surprisingly, fundamentalist preachers who urge their flocks to focus on the rewards of the next life rather than fight for justice in this one. Jim Casy, the fallen preacher whose congregation included the Joads, stands in contrast: the Dust Bowl makes him a humanist; confrontation with the police in California turns him into a radical.

On the other hand, Steinbeck portrays the Californians who wear deputy sheriffs' badges and join club-wielding mobs more as victims then villains. Like the men back in Oklahoma who did the dirty work of bulldozing the Okies' homes, they must either do what big business tells them or watch their families go hungry.

When the Joads stop at a gas station, the attendants' remarks to one another sum up the locals' attitude toward them: why would anyone want to live like that? As though the Okies had decided to become homeless and poor. Steinbeck portrays the migrants as human beings, not animals. Given a chance, they manage to organize their own society with an unwritten, but understood, set of rules. They even have a sense of humor: it's as dry as the fields they were forced to leave.

This is a novel for all ages. Young readers who find it on their reading list should have no problem following the story of the Joads' trek west. They'll care about what happens to the family. Older adults, whether they've read the novel before or not, will find plenty to mull over: Just how free are markets? Are women better than men at handling crises? Could something like this happen again?

The Grapes of Wrath isn't free of imperfections. The novel's structure--short chapters depicting the Okies' life in general, alternating with longer ones telling the Joads' story--is sometimes contrived. After a while, the migrants' down-home dialect becomes annoying. And the plot often moves as slowly as the Joads' jalopy chugs across the desert.

Today's America has been described as a "winner-take-all" society. Without thinking, many of us brand the less fortunate as "losers," a code word meaning "they brought it on themselves; they're on their own." The Grapes of Wrath reminds us that some people are losers because they've been sent out to fight battles they have no hope of winning.