The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

A memorable road trip

John Steinbeck, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of America’s all-time literary greats, known for such highly acclaimed novels as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, and Cannery Row. In any list of his major works or ranking of this top ten books, one title you are unlikely to see is his 1947 novel The Wayward Bus. Nevertheless, Steinbeck is one of those writers who is so good that even his minor works shine. The Wayward Bus may be an obscure and forgotten entry in his body of work, but I enjoyed it very much.

In the small crossroads town of Rebel Corners in the Salinas Valley of California, Juan Chicoy, a Mexican-American, and his wife Alice run a service station and diner for travelers. Juan also drives a passenger bus from Rebel Corners to San Juan de la Cruz, a connecting line between two Greyhound routes. As the story opens, Juan’s bus has broken down, and a handful of passengers have been stranded at Rebel Corners. Juan and Alice and their two employees, who all live at the site, have given up their bedrooms to these delayed travelers. As the sun rises, Juan and his young mechanic, Pimples Carson, repair the bus in order to get their fare-paying passengers back on the road. The weather reports are not good, with speculation that the San Ysidro River might flood, which would put everyone in an even more inconvenient or even dangerous situation. The passengers are itching to go, however, and Juan is tired of listening to their complaints, so he decides to risk it and get the journey underway.

What this book does really well is bring to life the gas-food-lodging culture and atmosphere of 1940s travel. Of course, I wouldn’t know what it was like to ride a long-distance bus in the ’40s, but I made my share of Greyhound trips in the ’80s and ’90s. This book vividly brings to mind that atmosphere of wanderlust and fatigue, the collection of characters you meet on such trips, and the seemingly random locations where the bus makes its periodic stops. Before the installment of the interstate highway system, road travel had a more rustic, anything-can-happen feel to it, which this book captures really well. Also, as one would expect from Steinbeck gives the landscape of California much consideration and describes it in vivid, loving detail.

The bus and highways and diner pie, however, merely serve as the backdrop for a story that is really about an assortment of human beings momentarily thrown together by their intersecting itineraries. It is the realism of the characters, their thoughts and behaviors, that really makes this a captivating read. The drama is heightened by the fact that in this bygone pre-internet age, an adventurous traveler could change his or her entire life by simply turning a different corner, not looking back, and deciding to be someone else. These are people the reader will recognize from their own lives, and Steinbeck is very insightful about what’s going on in their heads: what men want from women, what women want from men, how men see themselves through their work, how different personalities conflict with and influence one another. When a beautiful blonde woman, traveling alone, walks into the diner, the reactions of the other characters, man and woman alike, are realistic variations of lust, envy, hostility, and bumbling foolishness. A successful business man, traveling with his wife and daughter, brings a touch of the capitalist criticism of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Steinbeck is also to be commended for treating Hispanic characters as real human beings rather than the common stereotypes of the time.

The Wayward Bus isn’t the kind of book that wins prizes or inspires critical plaudits. It’s not about starving farmers fighting for survival; it’s about middle-class Americans with prosaic problems, hopes, and desires that to them (and us) often feel like romantic, monumental crises. Steinbeck does a beautiful job of illustrating the crucial dramas in everyday lives, in a way that is as real as life itself yet as compelling as literature should be.

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

Bites off more than most general readers can chew

Nicholas Ostler is a British scholar with degrees in linguistics, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, among others. He is currently the chairman of the Foundation for Ancient Languages. The publisher HarperCollins says Ostler has “a working knowledge of twenty-six languages.” His book Empires of the Word was published in 2005.

In this book, Ostler writes about what he calls “language dynamics,” that is, how languages are born, proliferate, migrate, and die. Why does one language succeed in dominating large portions of the world, through millions of native and secondary speakers, while many others languish and disappear over time? Ostler explains how these rises and falls have played out numerous times over the course of world history due to causes such as military conquest, imperialism, trade relations, economic influence, religious conversion, government bureaucracy, mass media, and perceived status and prestige. Ostler doesn’t provide a unifying thesis as to how languages survive and thrive. Rather, he examines the spread and decline of languages over the course of history and examines each pivotal turning point on a case-by-case basis, often drawing parallels between the trajectories of ancient and modern languages. He focuses much attention on the languages that are most prominent in the world today, and how they got that way.

As for the intended audience, I’m guessing this is a history book written for linguists. Ostler certainly assumes a lot of prior knowledge of history and languages on the part of the reader. I was hoping for something a little more accessible to general readers, like Gaston Dorren’s books Lingo and Babel, which cover many of the same topics as this book but in a much more user-friendly manner. Empires of the Word is such a relentless barrage of detail it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. Ostler’s prose often reads like a text composed entirely of footnotes. Foreign words discussed in the text are often accompanied by a phonetic approximation of pronunciation, yet there is no key provided as to the system of phonetic notation used, so the reader is simply expected to know that. Even if the notation is a standard with which linguists would be familiar, the reliability of the phonetic transcriptions is called into question by typographical issues with font glyphs and diacritics (in the ebook, as discussed below). The only thing that might make me think this book is meant for general readers is Ostler’s repetitive summarizing of his points and conclusions. By the time you get to the end, it feels like you’ve read the same book three times.

Ostler likes to quote from historical texts. He presents these quotes in their original language (often non-Latin alphabets) and then in English translation. It is often interesting to see the comparison between the two writing systems. Early in the book, however, Ostler uses the French phrase “coup de grâce.” In the ebook edition, the “a” accented with a circumflex is replaced by an “s” with an hacek. This is a font error that likely does not occur in the print edition, but this caused me to question the accuracy of the spelling and diacritics of all the foreign words, of which there are many, throughout the ebook. How do I know if what I’m seeing is correct? The “s” with an hacek appears quite frequently, and some words have dollar signs in them. Of course, a font problem is no fault of the author’s, but rather a production issue that is the publisher’s responsibility, so Ostler is not to blame. Near the end of the book, there’s a chapter about the top twenty languages in the world today, in terms of number of speakers. Throughout the chapter, Ostler repeatedly refers to “the list,” yet the list itself is not provided to the reader. My guess is that the list was formatted as a table, and that table was excluded from the ebook. Perhaps that’s also what happened to the pronunciation key. HarperCollins really did not do a very good job of putting this ebook together, resulting in a rather annoying experience for the reader.

Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

Colombia’s Faulkner

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature largely on the strength of his highly esteemed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book Collected Novellas, first published in 1991, brings together three lesser-known works of shorter fiction that complement that bestselling classic.

Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s first book, was published in 1955. He uses the phrase “leaf storm” to signify the influx of foreign interests that turned a small Colombian village into a boom town for the fruit industry. Against this backdrop, the story deals with the death of a citizen who was far from beloved by his fellow townspeople. The narrative is related through the alternating first-person perspectives of a father, daughter, and grandson who knew the deceased. Through a series of chronologically jumbled scenes, García Márquez reveals the back story of the dead man, from his arrival in town to his demise, as well as the private secrets of the family of narrators. Stylistically, this novella bears much resemblance to the writing of William Faulkner in novels like As I Lay Dying. I would have also sworn that Leaf Storm was influenced by Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, but the two books were released in the same year, so any cause-and-effect relationship between the two seems unlikely.

The next selection, No One Writes to the Colonel, was first published in 1958. An aged and destitute veteran of a previous civil war (the Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902) awaits the military pension he was promised. The current regime has placed his village under martial law. Again, death and funerary matters play a prominent role in the story, as the Colonel attends the funeral of a local musician. The final selection, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, published in 1981, is the best-known of the three works in this volume and the most compelling. In the opening pages, an Arab Colombian named Santiago Nasar is murdered. García Márquez then flashes back to reveal the story behind the killing, which he relates in a nonlinear fashion through the perspectives of various witnesses. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the crime is that everyone in town, except the victim, seems to see the murder coming, and most simply accept it as a foregone conclusion.

Though stand-alone works in their own right, these three novellas are set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel both take place in Macondo, the same fictional village in which One Hundred Years is set. Macondo is García Márquez’s equivalent to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, another fictional setting that unifies multiple related novels. Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not mention Macondo, but, like the other two novellas included here, García Marquez does drop the name of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a character from One Hundred Years of Solitude who figures prominently in the history of this fictional vision of Colombia, much like Faulkner often refers to the Snopes and Compson families in his Yoknapatawpha novels. I use Faulkner here merely as a stylistic comparison and don’t mean to imply that García Márquez’s writings are in any way derivative of or inferior to those of Faulkner. In fact, I prefer the writings of García Márquez. He uses the same modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear chronology, and varying narrative perspectives, but unlike Faulkner he doesn’t overly indulge in deliberately obscure wordplay. Chronicle of a Death Foretold impressed me even more than One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the other two novellas in this collection are also very fine works worthy of a Nobel laureate.

Novellas in this collection

Leaf Storm

No One Writes to the Colonel

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich

Assorted investigations in natural science

Biologist Bernd Heinrich was born in Germany and emigrated to Maine with his family as a young boy. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, but he lives in Maine and has a cabin there where he seems to spend a lot of time. Heinrich first came to my attention for his investigations into the intelligence of ravens, but he is primarily an entomologist who has done extensive research on bees. Heinrich’s father Gerd Heinrich was also an esteemed entomologist.

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich was published in 2018. It is a collection of articles that Heinrich wrote for various periodicals. Almost all of the selections come from the magazine Natural History, where he appears to have had a regular column. Other than that, there are two articles each from Audubon, Outside, and the New York Times, and one from Orion. The majority of these essays are about observations and studies of nature that Heinrich made on his land in Maine. The rest take place in locations around the world where he has conducted research, such as the Canadian Arctic, the Judaean Desert in Israel, and the Okavango Delta in Botswana. In a typical chapter, Heinrich observes a pattern of animal behavior and comes up with an idea of how and why such a behavior would evolve. He then conducts further observations or experiments to test the validity of his hypothesis. Some examples of his inquiries include how bumblebees regulate their body heat, why water beetles gather in clumps, how the structure of tree branches determines their ability to survive ice storms, how tiny Golden-crowned Kinglets survive icy Maine winters, why there is a predominance of red flowers in the Middle East, and why all plant growth seems to twist in a counterclockwise direction.

Despite the title, I find it hard to believe that these are the best essays of Bernd Heinrich. If they titled the book Assorted Odds and Ends by Bernd Heinrich, however, it probably wouldn’t sell very well. This is basically a collection of magazine articles from mainstream periodicals (not scholarly journals), most of which are not feature articles but rather the sort of short articles and columns you find in the front of most science magazines before you get to the meatier fare.

I have a lot of respect for Heinrich’s work as a naturalist, but I was a bit bored by these writings. He makes the science seem moderately interesting but far from fascinating. Heinrich presents a very nuts-and-bolts approach to natural science: I noticed this. I formed a hypothesis. I tested it thusly. I came to these conclusions. Don’t expect the philosophizing of Thoreau in these Maine Woods. I was anticipating something more along the lines of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, another naturalist who wrote about the wilderness surrounding his cabin (in Wisconsin rather than Maine), but even Leopold’s essays on wildlife conservation policy read more poetically than Heinrich’s articles. What’s missing is any sense of what it feels like to be present in the wild places that Heinrich is describing. These essays read more like they were written in a laboratory. My guess is that Heinrich’s long-form books are more satisfying than these short essays. His workmanlike prose could benefit from some more room to breathe. I’d like to give his A Year in the Maine Woods a try, to see if there might be a little more Thoreau in him after all.

The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

25,000 feet under the sea

The Maracot Deep is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final novel. It was first published in book form in 1929; he died the following year. The novel was previously published in serial form in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (1927) and The Strand Magazine (1927-1928). The Maracot Deep is a science fiction novel of undersea exploration. The work will spark obvious comparisons to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but it really has more in common with Conan Doyle’s own 1912 novel The Lost World.

Esteemed British oceanographer and marine biologist Dr. Maracot organizes an expedition to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He takes along two companions: zoologist Cyrus Headley, who serves as the narrator for most of the book, and Bill Scanlan, an American mechanic who serves much the same purpose as Verne’s Ned Land of Twenty Thousand Leagues. The team are lowered to the ocean floor in a vehicle similar to a bathysphere, except that this submersible is box-shaped, like an elevator. They descend five miles down into the deepest trench in the Atlantic, named the Maracot Deep in honor of the professor. The lifeline to their surface vessel is cut, leaving them stranded at the bottom of the trench with impending death a foregone conclusion. They are miraculously saved, however, by a race of undersea dwellers who prove to be the descendants of the centuries-old sunken civilization of Atlantis. 

While Verne was more interested in actual oceanographic science, here Conan Doyle is more interested in fantasy. In order for his crew to have even the slightest chance of surviving, Conan Doyle conveniently dispenses with the intense pressure exerted by great depths of water. He just invents a theory to eliminate that obstacle. One commendable choice, however, is that these Atlanteans are not able to breathe in water like fish. Instead, they have created technology to master their environment, including a breathing apparatus that would put modern scuba gear to shame. At the bottom of the ocean, Maracot and company encounter all manner of sea serpents and lethal beasts that are more mythical than scientifically authentic. Regrettably, the reader only learns the bare basics about Atlantis and its inhabitants because as soon as the three heroes make it to the ancient sunken city, they’ve already started looking for an escape from their hosts.

Even as late as 1927, Conan Doyle is unwilling to allow for a disembodied third-person narration or an interior first-person perspective. Instead, he sticks with the Victorian convention that all stories must be told in the concrete form of a written document, such as a diary, a letter, or a message in a bottle. This makes for some clunky logistics in the telling of this story, such as unnecessary multiple perspectives and a jumbled chronology. The novel proper basically ends with chapter five, but Conan Doyle must have had a seven-issue contract with the Strand, because he tacks on two chapters at the end that really should have been integrated into the main narrative rather than presented as afterthoughts. Conan Doyle’s most egregious sin with this novel, however, is that he can’t find enough sci-fi potential in undersea exploration, so he resorts to throwing in some of his usual supernatural spiritualist mumbo jumbo.

I don’t believe Conan Doyle wrote The Maracot Deep to compete with or capitalize on Verne’s masterpiece. Rather, I think he simply wanted to try his hand at one of the few subgenres of adventure literature—undersea exploration—that he hadn’t yet covered. The Maracot Deep really doesn’t hold a candle to Twenty Thousand Leagues, and it reveals Conan Doyle to be past his prime at this point. There just isn’t enough science in this watered-down science fiction.

Footsteps of Fate by Louis Couperus

Dutch treat

Louis Couperus (1863-1923) was a Dutch novelist and poet who enjoyed some international success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His novel Footsteps of Fate (Dutch title: Noodlot) was published in 1890. According to literary critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote the introduction to the first English translation of the novel, Couperus was a member of the Dutch Sensitivists school (a term I’ve never seen anywhere else, so maybe Gosse invented it). As far as I can tell from Gosse, this sounds like a literary school that was inspired by French Naturalism but didn’t want to admit that it was inspired by French Naturalism. Judging by Footsteps of Fate, Couperus writes in accord with the same philosophy of fatalism and heredity as the Naturalists, as exemplified by the novels of Emile Zola, but he stops short of the more blatantly coarse, vulgar, and offensive scenes and subject matter in the writings of Zola or even Balzac. The Sensitivists were also admirers of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a Zola protégé of Dutch ancestry.

Frank Westhove is a Dutch expatriate living in London. There are a few brief mentions of his background as an engineer, but at the time the story opens he seems to be living the life of an independently wealthy English gentleman, i.e. not working at all. One cold winter night he is approached by a shabby vagrant who turns out to be an old chum of his, Bertie van Maeren. Bertie had been to America, experienced some career failures and hard times, and was now homeless and almost penniless. He asks Frank for some assistance, and with a generous what-are-friends-for attitude, Frank invites Bertie into his home and promises to support him financially until he can get back on his feet. This turns into an extended roommate situation in which Frank and Bertie live the lives of well-to-do gentleman, financed entirely by Frank, who doesn’t seem to mind one bit. While the two are off on a trip to Norway, they meet some fellow Londoners, Sir Archibald Rhodes and his daughter Eva. The travelers get to know one another, and Frank, not surprisingly, falls in love with Eva. Rather than being happy for his friend, this relationship brings out the worst in Bertie, who fears that a union between Frank and Eva will rob him of his meal ticket and put him back out on the streets. 

One doesn’t learn much about Dutch life or literature from Footsteps of Fate. It reads very much like an English novel of the Victorian Era. It has a gentility about it that one doesn’t often find in the works of Naturalist literature, but nevertheless the fundamental elements of Naturalism are present: the faithfulness to realism and the assertion that much of mankind’s behavior is molded by social and hereditary forces and therefore out of one’s control. Some aspects of the story come across as unrealistic—most notably Frank’s limitless generosity and Eva’s exaggerated frailties—but one must keep in mind that what seems realistic in the 21st century differs from what would have seemed realistic to the Victorian readers of 1890. Bertie, however, rings true as a timeless archetypal example of the mooching houseguest. Footsteps of Fate starts out in a deceptively decorous and sober manner, but to Couperus’s credit, the book snowballs surprisingly into full-on unsparing Naturalism. Couperus fools you into a false sense of comfort and complacency before hitting you with the hard stuff towards the end.

I’m a fan of Naturalist literature in the vein of Zola or Frank Norris. This was my first experience with Couperus, and I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The characters are memorable, the situations believable, and the plot served up its fair share of surprises. I will definitely seek out more of Couperus’s novels in the future.

The Personal Equation by Eugene O‘Neill

The Hairy Ape lite

Eugene O’Neill

After having read several of Eugene O’Neill’s better-known plays, I became a fan of his writing and decided to set about reading his complete works. Doing so has led me to some rather obscure works of his, some unjustly obscure and some deservedly so. The Personal Equation, one such O’Neill rarity, falls somewhere between the two. Written in 1915 as a class project when O’Neill was at Harvard, The Personal Equation didn’t make it to the stage until over a century later, when the Provincetown Players performed the work in 2019. O’Neill himself wished for many of his earlier plays to remain forgotten, because they weren’t up to his later high standards, but The Personal Equation is certainly not the worst of his early efforts (the worst would likely be Welded, with Bread and Butter and Servitude close behind). Nevertheless, when O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, it is unlikely that The Personal Equation factored into that decision.

The fact that The Personal Equation is an issue-driven play makes it more interesting than the romances and relationship dramas from O’Neill’s early career. This play deals with labor issues of the World War I era, which if nothing else lends some historical value to the drama. Tom Perkins is a member of the IWE—International Workers of the Earth—a thinly veiled surrogate for the real-life IWW—Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies). While working clandestinely as a labor organizer and agitator, Tom has a day job working in the offices of the Ocean Steamship Company. He associates with a cell of other IWE activists, including his girlfriend Olga, with whom he cohabitates, a rather daring and progressive arrangement for an unmarried couple in those days. The IWE charges Tom with a dangerous mission to blow up the engines of the Ocean Steamship Company’s ship the SS San Francisco, in hopes that the action will inspire shipworkers to revolt in a general strike. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Tom’s father, Thomas Perkins Sr., is the second engineer on that very same SS San Francisco and a loyal company man who loves his job, his ship, and his engines. Regardless, to prove his loyalty to the IWE, Tom accepts the sabotage mission.

Early in his adult life, O’Neill worked for several years on merchant marine vessels and joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the IWW. The platform of the IWW was a mix of socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist principles. In The Personal Equation, O’Neill deliberately distances the fictional IWE from the “Socialists,” presumably meaning the Socialist Party of America. Though O’Neill may have been a member of the IWW, his depiction of the IWE in this play is not entirely positive. One gathers that he believed in the party line of the IWW, but he was disappointed with the management of the organization and its ineffectiveness in living up to its ideals. He also criticizes how the IWW and other leftist radicals abandoned their antiwar stance in the face of World War I jingoism.

Much of the first half of The Personal Equation is predictable, but the ending is rather cleverly unexpected. The premise of the play sets up some contrived scenes, particularly the father vs. son conflict, but if you think of this as political symbolism and don’t expect too much realism, one can appreciate the care and craft with which O’Neill constructed this drama to convey his intended message. Ultimately, however, The Personal Equation ends up feeling like a watered-down rough sketch for O’Neill’s later, greater, and much more powerful allegory of labor unrest and class struggle, The Hairy Ape. Still, if you are a fan of O’Neill’s work, and The Hairy Ape in particular, then The Personal Equation is a well-drawn rough sketch that’s worth a look.