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Jeffrey Yeager sat down to watch the Netflix adaptation of the book he’s been working on his entire career.
The vice president of the International Association of Steinbeck Scholars entered the seven-episode series “East of Eden,” directed and written by Zoë Kazan, with a “skeptical eye.” The series premiered only the day before, but she had already heard rumors about “how different it was from the book.”
Seven episodes later, he was won over by Kazan’s interpretation, 60 years after his grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film adaptation.
“I was very pleased. I thought it was great,” Yeager told TODAY.com.
The book that Steinbeck considered an epic was “East of Eden”. At over 600 pages, the book is long enough to include the origin stories of two sets of brothers; both are loosely based on the Creation story of Cain and Abel. Spanning from the Civil War era to World War I, the wide-ranging book also maps how two families came to live in California’s Salinas Valley; Hamiltons and Trasks.
Both the book and the characters within it are about good and evil, free will and fate.
“Do our genes determine who we are? Do our genes determine the path we will follow in life, or are we free to choose who we will be?” Yeager summarizes the questions posed by “East of Eden.”
Cal Trask (the show’s Joseph Zada) becomes particularly preoccupied with these questions as he learns more about his mother, Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh), and wonders whether he’s destined to carry her less than golden inheritance.
Steinbeck experts say Cathy’s nuanced portrayal of Kazan in “East of Eden” is what makes it so remarkable.
“I liked the opening chapter, and I liked how (Kazan) laid out the themes really clearly in terms of Cathy and the meditation on good and evil,” San Jose State University English professor Susan Shillinglaw, who served as director of the university’s Steinbeck Center for 18 years, tells TODAY.com.
In “East of Eden,” Steinbeck likens Cathy to a monster and, while introducing the character, writes: “The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a faulty egg can produce physical monsters, might not the same process produce a corrupted soul?”
According to Yeager, in the book, Cathy is portrayed as “the epitome of evil” and “someone who is missing something that is the key to being human.”
Certainly Cathy does bad things in both the show and the book; including killing her own parents and attempting to kill her twins’ father (and that’s not all).
But Kazan says Cathy tried to understand where her monstrosity came from and reframed her childhood to include sexual assault.
As another example of how the show shines a different light on Cathy, consider the situation with her teacher. In the book, it is clear that he manipulated a teacher to the point of taking his own life. “But in the show, the teacher tries to harass him and he takes advantage of the situation,” says Yeager.
Instead of being evil, Yeager says, Pugh’s Cathy is “trying to redefine morality in her own way.”
Yeager applauds Pugh’s performance, which alternates between “reptile eyes” and empathetic scenes.
“I think the show can’t decide where it wants to go (with Cathy), and in some ways that makes the show richer than the novel. It makes us think more about the character. How does evil come into the world?” Yeager says.
“The whole point of ‘East of Eden’ is to draw readers into an appreciation of who Cathy is.”
According to Shillinglaw, the show’s varying interpretations of Cathy are entirely consistent with the book’s legacy.
“The whole point of ‘East of Eden’ is to draw readers into an appreciation of who Cathy is,” says Shillinglaw. “He looks like the white whale from ‘Moby Dick.’ You have to keep looking at him. What does he mean? What is his purpose in the book?”
After watching all seven episodes, Yeager wishes more attention had been paid to Steinbeck’s own family, the Hamiltons.
“The Hamilton family was kind of tracing Steinbeck’s lineage, and I can see why that wasn’t important to the story the show was trying to tell,” Yeager says.
Lee praises the “emotionally charged performance” of Aron and Cal Trask’s caregiver, Hoon Lee, who plays a key role in the family’s recovery at the end of the show. It is also the voice of the story’s most overarching lesson: Timshel is a Hebrew word translated to allow for free will in victory over evil rather than fate.
Shillinglaw, who teaches a class on Steinbeck, says conversations about “East of Eden” have always been his favorites, and he expects the series, currently No. 1 on Netflix in the U.S., to bring more.
“Students found (the book) fascinating, and it was because of Cathy – what she meant and her legacy.”