Cannery Row by John Steinbeck: A Summary of the Novel and Its Themes
What Cannery Row is about
John Steinbeck published Cannery Row in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries. The novel has a plot, but it is loose and unhurried. What holds the book together is the street itself and the people who scrape a living on it.
At the centre is Doc, a marine biologist who runs a specimen business out of a building that is both laboratory and home. Across the road is Lee Chong's Heavenly Grocery, which supplies almost everything the neighbourhood needs. Nearby is the Bear Flag Restaurant, a bordello run by Dora Flood. And in a converted storage shack known as the Palace Flophouse live Mack and his boys, a group of unemployed men with no fixed income and a great deal of free time.
The story turns on a simple impulse. Doc has been good to Mack and the boys without ever asking for anything back. Mack decides they should repay him, and the idea they land on is a thank-you party. The whole community gets involved. The plan is generous and the execution is a disaster. The party rages out of control, Doc's lab and home are wrecked, and Doc's good humour goes with them. Wanting to make amends, Mack and the boys set about organising a second party, this time properly.
Around that spine, Steinbeck hangs a series of short chapters and side stories. The Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan described the novel as one that "invites us to see the world from a humble, and at times very narrow, perspective", from the engine of a dilapidated Ford Model T to the cash register of a grocery store, even to a brothel. That is a fair description of how the book works. It zooms in on small things and treats them seriously.
The main characters
Doc collects, prepares and sells specimens of fish and mammals for research and dissection, trading as Western Biological Laboratories. He pays bounties for creatures he needs, including cats and frogs, and keeps live animals on the premises alongside his own living quarters. He is the moral centre of the street, the man everyone goes to. Steinbeck based him on his close friend Ed Ricketts, a real marine biologist and entrepreneur.
Mack is the de facto leader of the group of homeless men who gather on the Row. It is Mack who negotiates with Lee Chong for the use of the storage shack, which the men fix up and christen the Palace Flophouse. His character was based on a real Cannery Row resident, Harold Otis "Gabe" Bicknell, whose photograph appeared on the cover of the 1994 paperback edition.
Lee Chong, an immigrant from China, owns and personally runs the grocery across from Doc's lab. He was inspired by Won Yee, an immigrant who operated the Wing Chong Company Grocery and pioneered the drying and preparation of squid for export to China. Won died in 1934.
Dora Flood runs the Bear Flag Restaurant, the busiest bordello in Monterey. She is the classic whore with a heart of gold, and her charity, both public and private, keeps parts of the community going. She was based on Flora Woods Adams, who also appears in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and East of Eden.
Hazel, the most prominent of Mack's boys, is simple minded and good hearted. He was given a female name by a mother too worn out by child-bearing to notice the error, or to care once she did. Henri is a painter who makes art from feathers and nutshells and is building a boat on blocks that will never go to sea. Women romance him in it and then leave, defeated by the cramped quarters and the absence of a bathroom.
The themes
Survival runs through the whole book. Nobody on the Row has money, and the question of how to eat, where to sleep and what can be traded is constant. Steinbeck treats that poverty without pity and without preaching.
Friendship is the engine of the plot. The two parties exist only because a group of men with nothing want to give something to a man who has been kind to them. Their methods are chaotic, but the motive is clean.
Class sits underneath everything. Doc is educated and self-employed. Lee Chong is a shopkeeper and a creditor. Mack and the boys sit outside the economy altogether. Steinbeck lets these people share a street without pretending the differences between them disappear.
Nature is present through Doc's work. He makes his living from tide pools and specimens, and the book keeps returning to the living world at the edge of the town.
Why it still matters
The place Steinbeck wrote about was real. Ocean View Avenue in Monterey had been informally called Cannery Row since the First World War, and in 1958 the street was formally renamed Cannery Row in his honour. Few novels have renamed the ground they stand on.
The book has kept moving between forms, with a film version in 1982 and a stage production in 1995. It suits readers who want character over incident, who like comedy with real hardship under it, and who are curious about Depression-era California as a lived place rather than a headline. It is short, warm and surprisingly tough.
