1Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck begins with a man in a flophouse complaining about a book he is a character in.
Mack has read Cannery Row and he has notes. He wants chapter headings, so he can find his way back to a chapter he liked. He wants plenty of talk and nobody telling him what the speaker looks like, because he would rather work that out from how the man talks. And he wants any fancy writing clearly fenced off at the top so he can skip it. He calls that part hooptedoodle.
The book then does all of it. Forty-two chapters, every one titled, two of them called Hooptedoodle.
What Has Changed Before Sweet Thursday Begins
Nine years separate Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck from its predecessor, and nearly everything has.
The sardines are gone, fished out during the war for patriotic reasons, which did not bring them back. The canneries stand silent with a watchman pacing. Lee Chong has sold the grocery, bought a schooner, loaded his entire stock into the hold and sailed for the South Seas. Dora Flood of the Bear Flag is dead and her sister Fauna runs the place as a finishing school with posture lessons and horoscopes. Gay was killed by anti-aircraft fallback over London.
And Doc is back from the army to a laboratory with a swollen door, rusted instruments and empty cages, and he cannot work out why he feels as he does.
What works
- Doc’s discontent is the best thing in Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck and nearly the best in the late work. Not grief, not illness, just the arithmetic of middle age. The chapter that asks what a man has put in the Great Ledger, and whether he has worked and eaten and loved enough, is written by someone who had recently done the sum himself.
- The Great Roque War is a perfect comic set-piece. Pacific Grove is given two roque courts by a philanthropist, the old men split into Blues and Greens, it reaches the families and then the politics and then the church, and it ends in arson, a clubbing and a bulldozer sent out at night.
- Suzy is sharper than her billing. The waitress-turned-nothing-much who refuses to produce a hard-luck story on request, and who answers Fauna’s pitch-perfect reconstruction of her life with nothing at all.
- The one-paragraph portrait of a small-town constable is as good as anything in the short stories: a man who knows which reported burglar is actually a rat in the dining room, and who gives children caught shoplifting a sense of mercy inside justice without damaging the dignity of the law.
Where Sweet Thursday Gives Ground
- It was written to be a musical, and Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck shows it. Steinbeck produced it hoping for a stage adaptation, and the plot is accordingly built from set-pieces, a masquerade, a raffle and a courtship with a deadline.
- The romance is contrived at the level of machinery. Fauna plays Cupid, a fortune is told to order, and the lovers are brought together by a third party breaking one of them.
- Doc is diminished by the premise. The man who was content in the first book is now a man who cannot be whole without a woman, which is a smaller idea than the one Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck inherited.
- Suzy’s goodness does all the work. Her decency is treated as cancelling her history, which is the sentimental shortcut the critics in 1954 jumped on and they were not wrong.
The Line That Explains Sweet Thursday
At the end of the Roque War chapter, having described a feud that ended in a death and an annual burning in effigy, the narrator notes that people will say the whole account is a lie, and then adds that a thing is not necessarily a lie even if it did not necessarily happen.
That sentence is the licence Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck runs on. These are real people, lightly renamed, in a real street, discussing a real book they appeared in, while the author who put them there follows their notes on how to write the sequel.
It is a strange and modern thing to find in 1954, and it is the reason Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck survives its own plot. The plot is a vehicle. The game is the point.
Read it if
- You have read Cannery Row and want the second half of the same world with the economy knocked out from under it.
- You want Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck for the middle-age writing, which is unguarded in a way the famous books never are.
- You enjoy a book that argues with its own predecessor in its first three pages.
Skip it if
- You need the romance plot of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck to be credible, because it is not.
- You found the earlier book sentimental, since this is further along that road.
- The idea of a novel engineered for Broadway puts you off before you start.
Where Sweet Thursday Sits in the Backlist
Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck arrives in 1954, two years after East of Eden, and he told his agent he meant it as the light and astringent counterweight to that book’s weight.
It worked commercially. Viking shifted two thousand copies in a single day that June, it held the bestseller list for five weeks and finished as the seventh best-selling novel of the year. The notices were another matter: Time called it a turkey with visible Saroyanesque stuffings, and most of the trade agreed that the powers were going.
Then came the adaptation it had been written for. Rodgers and Hammerstein turned it into Pipe Dream, which opened in November 1955 as their seventh show and became the worst financial failure of their partnership. Hammerstein, uneasy about a prostitute as a female lead, progressively obscured what Suzy did and what Fauna’s house was. The book had been built for a stage that then refused the only thing holding it together.
Content notes
Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck treats prostitution comically throughout, including a brothel run as a finishing school. A woman’s history of a violent home, a teenage marriage and a lost baby, handled briefly. One character deliberately breaks another’s arm. Period racial language about Chinese and Mexican characters, used by the narration as well as the cast.
Read these next
- A Literary Analysis of East of Eden by John Steinbeck. The book this one was written to be the opposite of, finished two years earlier.
- A Literary Analysis of Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Monterey country people at full strength, with none of the softness.
- A Literary Analysis of The Pearl by John Steinbeck. The other short late book, and proof that he could still build a hard ending when he wanted one.
- The Timshel Debate. On choice, which is what Hazel is handed in a jail cell halfway through this book.
Worth Your Shelf
Yes, if the first book is already on it.
What raises the book above its reputation is not the comedy, which is broad, and not the love story, which is assembled rather than written. It is that the author of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck was in real trouble when he wrote it. His closest friend, the man Doc is built from, had been killed by a train six years earlier. His second marriage had ended. He had spent the intervening years unable to settle to anything.
So the comic sequel he agreed to produce for Broadway turns out to contain a long, exact, unflinching passage about a man in his forties discovering that he has begun to keep score against himself, and finding that the beer no longer tastes of anything.
He gave that man his dead friend’s name, surrounded him with people who love him stupidly and well, and at the end let them give him a telescope he never asked for. Doc looks at it and says it hardly matters whether you look down or up, provided you look. Then the car climbs the kerb, takes the laboratory steps off with it, and goes.
