Cannery Row

 This March we took a road trip to Oregon. On the way back we stopped in Monterey to check out the aquarium. We stop at aquaria whenever we’re road tripping, it’s one of our things. On this particular trip we stopped at the Crescent City Aquarium on the way up, and Monterey Bay on the way back down. 

The only thing I really knew about Monterey was that it had a world class aquarium, and it had once been home to a sardine fishing fleet that decimated the fish population off the west coast. 

I didn’t know about John Steinbeck’s association with the town, or the history of the weird population that lived there in the first half of the twentieth century, but he’s all over that place. There’re statues of Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, Mack and the Boys, plaques, streets signs, and Western Biological is still there, patiently waiting to be turned into a museum  

As we drove home I downloaded Cannery Row and gave it a read. That was two months ago. Since then I’ve read it three times. 

I was a terrible student, and until I could get books on my phone I didn’t dig reading. So, while all the students were being taught the American literary canon, I was teaching myself to program computers - something they didn’t teach in schools at the time. Consequently I never read Steinbeck. Now, I’ve only read Cannery Row, I don’t have the bandwidth to read more, my backlog is too deep, but I’m deeply in love with the writing  

They say that a musician’s style is defined by his failed attempts to imitate his inspirations. I think the same thing is true of any art form, including writing. While I wouldn’t venture to replicate Steinbeck’s poesy, or his social commentary, the narrative structure of the book speaks to me. 

At 49,512 words, it’s shorter than a NaNoWriMo book, arranged in 32 chapters. The plot is simple, and follows a relatively standard format - Mack and the Boys want to throw a party for Doc. They have some adventures preparing for it, the party fails in a big way, they seek the advice of someone wiser than them, and they double their efforts, resulting in a smashing success. 

It’s a simple plot, but the structure built around it is a series of narrative digressions that introduce interesting characters and locations. These characters may or may not show up again, and some of them appear (at first blush) to have nothing to do with the story. 

I love this structure, it makes it easy to read. And, I imagine, easy to write. Each chapter is a self-enclosed vignette, or short story. The plot moves in the background, and occasionally comes to the front when Mack and the Boys are featured, but even then the chapters are self-contained. Ages ago I read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. And I remember it having a similar structure.

This gives me the opportunity to write small vignettes, designed to introduce a quirky character or location, in easy to work with chunks. If this strategy works for me, I think it will be fun. Keep watching this space for further updates.