I first read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden many years ago, but the sprawling, multigenerational tale of the Trasks continues to exert a profound influence on me.
asserted
tale → read → me
It was for this reason that I greeted Netflix’s announcement of a new adaptation with equal parts intrigue and apprehension.
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I → greet → intrigue
Netflix, after all, is not exactly renowned for treating period literature as holy writ (I was wholly prepared for a blossoming gay romance between Adam and Lee).
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I → renowne → Adam
For those who haven’t read the novel, I envy your privilege of experiencing it for the first time (and encourage you to do so before reading this review or watching the adaptation).
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I → read → adaptation
For everyone else, I won’t meander through the plot beyond the points pertinent to the adaptation’s triumphs and occasional shortcomings.
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I → meander → triumphs
Screenwriter Zoe Kazan has largely succeeded in crafting a cohesive and remarkably faithful retelling of an unwieldy work.
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Kazan → succeed → work
Any adaptation of East of Eden lives or dies by whether it preserves Steinbeck’s central preoccupation with good, evil, inheritance, and choice.
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it → live → good
Florence Pugh, therefore, inspired little confidence when, discussing Cathy Ames — one of literature’s great villains — she cheerfully explained that it was her job to make audiences “sympathize and maybe fall in love with her a little bit.”
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audiences → inspire → her
Either Pugh has not seen her own performance, or Steinbeck proved more difficult to dislodge than expected.
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Steinbeck → see → performance
His introduction to Cathy — “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents” — persists in every icy stare.
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I → believe → stare
Kazan softens Cathy with calculated doses of sympathy, most conspicuously by allowing her to narrate portions of the story from her own perspective, while adding a punitive father and childhood trauma and removing some of her more gleeful admissions of cruelty.
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her → soften → cruelty
Yet Pugh never saps her of wickedness.
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Pugh → sap → wickedness
She plays Cathy as equal parts beguilingly seductive and terrifying: beautiful, calculating, and barbarous.
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She → play → Cathy
The seven-episode format serves Steinbeck’s enormous canvas far better than a feature film could.
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film → serve → canvas
Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation with James Dean remains a classic, but it concentrates largely on the novel’s final section.
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it → remain → section
Here, the first half interweaves Adam and Charles Trask’s brutal upbringing under a father determined to raise soldiers with Cathy’s own origins, gradually bringing their parallel paths together when she arrives, battered nearly to death, at the brothers’ doorstep.
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she → interweave → doorstep
Adam (Christopher Abbott, superbly cast alongside Mike Faist as Charles) promptly falls in love with her.
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Adam → cast → her
Adam pines for California’s untamed Eden and dreams of building “a home worthy of my wife,” while his wife is upstairs attempting a DIY abortion with a knitting needle.
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wife → pin → needle
The series makes the extremity of Cathy’s self-destructive nihilism especially clear when the doctor tells her that her unborn children are perfectly healthy and that he intends to see them safely born.
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them → make → her
She wants them gone anyway.
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them → want → ?
Cathy understands what people desire and turns those desires into weapons.
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people → understand → weapons
Faye (played precisely as I imagined her by Martha Plimpton), her naive and loving employer, later in the story, effectively signs her own death certificate by putting Cathy in her will.
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I → play → will
Pugh stares at her with convincing daughterly affection while furtively poisoning her.
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Pugh → star → her
Kazan also cleverly draws repeated attention to Cathy’s relationship with alcohol.
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Kazan → draw → alcohol
She abstains from imbibing, though not out of any health-obsessed zeal (like today’s Generation Z).
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She → abstain → Z
Intoxication compromises her command of a room and threatens to expose the kindly façade she so carefully constructs.
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she → compromise → façade
She plainly derives no pleasure from champagne, sex, or money.
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She → derive → champagne
Few villains can rival such unvarnished evil.
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villains → rival → evil
Lady Macbeth craved power but went mad once the blood was spilled.
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blood → crave → power
Even Medea, in Euripides’ tragedy, murders her husband’s new bride and their children out of a broken heart and consuming vengeance.
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Medea → murder → heart
Cathy has no heart to break.
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Cathy → have → heart
As the story passes into its second generation, the adaptation wisely gives greater weight to Steinbeck’s moral center.
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adaptation → pass → center
Ciaran Hinds makes a terrific Samuel Hamilton, while Hoon Lee is superb as Lee, Adam’s housekeeper, confidant, and the novel’s great wellspring of wisdom.
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Lee → make → wisdom
Much of the sprawling Hamilton family has necessarily been pared away, but Lee survives with his philosophical importance intact.
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importance → sprawl → family
A clever creative liberty also finds Cathy increasingly haunted by visions of Charles, whose apparition follows her descent into paranoia.
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apparition → find → paranoia
The device works because Charles understood her before almost anyone else did.
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anyone → work → her
The two recognize something of themselves in each other.
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two → recognize → other
It also helps bridge Cathy’s story to the second-generation Cain-and-Abel struggle between Cal and Aron without absolving her of the destruction she leaves behind.
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she → help → destruction
That struggle brings the adaptation to the idea upon which East of Eden ultimately rests: timshel — “thou mayest.”
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thou → bring → Eden
Cal, terrified that his mother’s nature lives inside him, confesses, “I have her in me.”
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I → terrify → me
…and 15 more, not listed.
The Aporia
