Michael Canoeist's Reviews > To a God Unknown

An odd, often clumsy, but also fearless book. To a God Unknown is John Steinbeck's second novel, following a historical romance. I would not have guessed, in reading its first half, that I would end up giving it a 4-star rating, but its insistence on its unusual pantheistic themes, coupled with Steinbeck's tremendous evocation of the interior, unsung part of the California landscape's beauties and terrors, combined for powerful effect. The reader must be prepared for unrealistic dialogue -- Steinbeck may have been trying to write on a small-b biblical level, reaching for a mythic tone. In that way, it is a young man's book, a little braver than even he may have realized at the time; and whether Steinbeck knew Melville's comment ("To write a great book, one must be able to write badly," as I remember it), he was practicing it. A cold eye could enumerate many examples of that latter aspect, but only someone impervious to the hunger for the spiritual side of life will sustain a cold eye throughout his reading of this one. I was reading it simultaneously with John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, where sharp, accurate, revealing dialogue is one of O'Hara's great strengths; and it was an interesting contrast. Both were written at approximately, or possibly exactly the same time, published one year apart in 1933 and 1934. While To a God Unknown never comments on the Depression, and is set a couple decades earlier, it is imbued with some kind of recognition of it. Steinbeck's protagonist moves to the west, finds great opportunity in his homesteading, and the rest of his family follow him out and set up a ranch together. Joseph Wayne remains their leader and patriarch, and is obsessed with fertility in all forms, but especially in the power of the land blooming with it. Both his crusade for fertility, and the mystical, spiritual yearnings that drove it, have to reflect some influence from American life at the pit of the Depression. Steinbeck is good with the Mexican characters that appear here, too. A unique book.