Book Review: The Pearl

Title: The Pearl

Author: John Steinbeck

Date: 1945, 1964 (et al.)

Publisher: Woman’s Home Comapnion magazine, Viking, Bantam (et al.)

ISBN: none

Length: 118 pages

Quote: “All manner of people grew interested in Kino—people with things to sell and people with favors to ask.”

For those who’ve not already read it, The Pearl is the story of what happens when poor people in a poor village find a treasure. When they had no money to pay, the doctor refused to give the baby medicine. After they have the giant pearl, the doctor offers the baby medicine whether the baby needs the medicine or not. People who shared their pleasure in their good fortune, during the day, try to steal the pearl at night. People attack the young man Kino in the dark. Stabbing out wildly with his knife, he kills a neighbor. And so on.

Although Steinbeck described this pearl of a novel as “a parable,” a story boiled down to black-and-white contrast, it has enough complexity to support any beliefs you might have about wealth. How much of the trouble comes from the fact that Kino has a pearl, and how much from the fact that he (naïvely) boasted about it? Should he have thrown it away, sold it fast for an unfairly low price, or kept it a secret? If the neighbors had more ways to make money honestly, would they feel the same desperate greed that motivates them to try to steal the pearl?

Kino and Juana are indigenous Mexicans. They talk about having money to pay the wealthier Spanish people in town, to whom they owe money, who are not and have never been part of their community: the doctor, a priest, a school. They don’t mention plans to spread the wealth around the village, although the news of their treasure makes shopkeepers remember things they haven’t sold and the beggars remember that “there is no almsgiver like a poor man who is suddenly lucky.” Is that why the neighbors turn against them?

There are a few people who don’t like The Pearl. Some object to the violence (the couple quarrel, and the baby is lost, before the end of the book). I think most of the objection to the use of this book in high school dates back to a time when it might have been turned into a discussion of Communism and Capitalism. I hope the discussions are more sensible by now. It could be turned into a discussion of the issues immediately facing teenagers. Is an expensive jacket worth the money if you can’t safely leave it on the coat rack with other people’s jackets? Do you know anyone who’s been mugged for a necklace or a video game?

It’s Steinbeck, so you know it has some literary merit as well. Part of the pearly luminescence of this book comes from Steinbeck’s acute perceptions and precise language. No blur of brownish green in the sea for him: “The brown algae waved its gentle currents and the green eel grass swayed and little sea horses clung to its stems.” Steinbeck characters, even (disturbingly) in his nonfiction, always seem to have been belittled—as if Steinbeck had a need to remind us that their I.Q. scores are lower than his or, presumably, ours—but they are treated with empathy; even the doctor’s money-grubbing callousness stems from a longing to return to Paris where “he remembered the hard-faced woman who had lived with him as a beautiful and kind girl, although she was none of these three.”

The Pearl is recommended to anyone who hasn’t already read it.