No Tidy Arc: Steinbeck's "In Dubious Battle"

So, like somehow, I missed a lot of books that some people read in school. Like I didn’t read Mockingbird or 1984 for class and had to come around to them later. The same thing happened with Steinbeck – he’s a homegrown Nobel Prize winner and all that I was assigned from him was Grapes of Wrath for summer reading before my sophomore honors English class.

I don’t know if then I even read the whole thing. The book was long, you know. Even if I did read it, I didn’t appreciate it like I did when I just reread it twenty-five years later. I was looking for topical writing to try to keep my mind off of the pandemic and I read the Plague and then I bough a new copy of the Grapes of Wrath and was just blown away by it.

All that is just a way to preface this statement: Steinbeck is an amazing writer. Grapes was so good and well-constructed that I turned around and wanted to read more. The Steinbeck that I had read other than Grapes were some of the shorter works – Cannery Row, Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat – and I wanted to find a novel, so I got the one from right before Grapes, In Dubious Battle. Here’s why I think that Steinbeck wasn’t taught in my classes. It’s the people he writes about. Steinbeck is a proletarian writer looking at the people of the country that is mirrored a bit in someone like Flannery O’Connor but we really don’t see people’s relationships with their work that we see in Steinbeck.

Perhaps then, the work of Steinbeck is too far left wing, like here in In Dubious Battle where the two main characters are communist strike organizers. It sure is funny that they didn’t have this on our reading lists! But the thing is that none of the work is “Propaganda” with those scare quotes. Both here Mac and Jim the organizers or in Grapes any of the Joads or the Preacher Jim Casy are one dimensional heroes. They’re complex individuals facing their work and the larger context of depression-era America. That this implies questioning the idea of the American dream is not the subtle pro-American preaching that you find in the curriculum. Better to watch Jim and Huck and ignore some of those words they say – Holden doesn’t exist, ignore them.

Overall, this is a well constricted book moving from the introduction of the characters to their dubious battle that pulls the reader along. One thing to note is that Steinbeck liked to leave endings ambiguous, as if there was not necessarily the larger tidy arc of fiction but that slow roll of real life, where our stories have no ending up until the final curtain.