What to Read if You Loved “East of Eden”

Of the sixteen novels that John Steinbeck published before his death, in 1968, “East of Eden” was his favorite. “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this,” he said of the multigenerational epic, which follows two families in the author’s agrarian home town of Salinas, California. Published in 1952, the book is narrated by a fictionalized version of Steinbeck, who recounts the travails of the wealthy but miserable Trasks and the hardscrabble but lively Hamiltons, from the late nineteenth century to the First World War.

“East of Eden” is back on the cultural radar because of a buzzy new adaptation, on Netflix, that centers on Cathy Ames (played by Florence Pugh), an iron-willed woman who marries the hapless Adam Trask, gives birth to twins, and abandons them all as soon as she’s physically able, to join—and eventually run—a brothel. (When Adam asks her what he’s to do with two infants, she tells him to throw them down a well.) Suffice it to say, Cathy is the main reason to tune in.

I hope it’s not too blasphemous to declare that I preferred the miniseries to the book, despite finding the adaptation rather uneven. The show’s creator, Zoe Kazan, makes Cathy sympathetic, her villainy a product of the gendered violence of her era—something Steinbeck didn’t bother to do, as he considered her a born sociopath. I also loved Kazan’s elaboration on the character of Lee, Adam’s cerebral servant, who ends up raising Adam’s children while grappling with his inability to truly belong anywhere as a Chinese American in the early-twentieth-century United States.

But the novel is not without its advantages. Its chief edge over the series is its sense of historical sweep, conveyed via the book’s aging narrator, who seeks to impart how things used to be: how miraculous refrigerators initially felt, or how absurdly difficult it was to start the earliest automobiles. (My favorite chapter involves the narrator’s mother, Olive Hamilton, taking her first flight. She “did not believe” in aviation, he says—the Wright brothers had taken their inaugural ride less than two decades prior—but Olive gets on an airplane in spite of her terror, so as not to let her children down.) I didn’t always respond to the narrator’s tone of folksy garrulousness, but his love of his native soil—its seasons, its scents—gives the story a warmth that didn’t quite make the leap from page to screen. And, like all beloved multigenerational tales, the novel is wonderfully immersive—this one particularly so because it weaves in Steinbeck’s own family history.

For those who enjoy this kind of sweeping story, I recommend Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex,” another multigenerational saga that blends imagination and biography. Or, if “East of Eden” ’s backdrop of historical events appealed to you, try Min Jin Lee’s nearly century-spanning “Pachinko,” which explores the effects on one family of Japan’s colonization of Korea. Or read Isabel Allende’s magical-realist “The House of the Spirits,” which weaves together references to Chile’s political turmoil with complicated familial dynamics.

For more: read our critic Alexandra Schwartz on how the show unnecessarily softens Steinbeck’s most evil character.