At a Glance
- Narrator: Jonathan Davis reads a work made entirely of dated letters, where nothing on the page exists to mark one entry ending and the next beginning.
- Subjects: The writing process, craft anxiety, friendship with an editor, domestic life during composition.
- Tone: Intimate, digressive, quietly obsessive.
- Bottom line: Essential for anyone who writes, and much richer if East of Eden is already behind you.
Steinbeck kept a second manuscript running alongside the first, and this audiobook is that second manuscript. Every working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, he opened a notebook, wrote a letter to his editor and friend Pascal Covici on the left-hand page, and then filled the facing page with East of Eden. The letters were, in his own phrase, a way of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game". The verdict is easy: this is one of the most useful documents about novel-writing in existence, and its usefulness comes precisely from the fact that it was never meant to be one.
Letters on the Left Page, the Novel on the Right
Two books were physically made at once, and the arrangement explains everything about the tone. Because the letters sat opposite the day's work rather than in a separate diary, they carry no performance of authorship at all. Story arguments arrive next to concern for his sons, next to worry about pencils, next to the plain mechanics of how many words a session should yield. The subjects rotate without warning, and the rotation is the point: this is a record of what actually occupies a novelist's mind during composition, which turns out to be about a third craft, a third domestic logistics and a third managed anxiety.
Reader response splits along a line worth knowing about. One five-star listener admits to having loved this more than the novel, describing a constant battle with the characters and finding that the correspondence "book is really a story in itself". Another was reading both texts concurrently in the hope that the letters would explain East of Eden, and reports that they helped only a little. Both reactions are correct. As commentary on a specific novel this is thin, because Steinbeck rarely explains his own decisions; as a portrait of a working mind under sustained pressure, it is unusually complete.
1,500 Words a Day for Nine Months
Discipline is the real subject, and the pool's oldest notice describes it better than any summary could, recalling a writer who sharpened his beloved pencils, sat down and warmed up every working day, clearing his mind and setting out the day's goals before averaging around 1,500 words. That figure lands differently when you hear it than when you read it. Nine months of that routine produced a very long novel and this book alongside it, and the arithmetic is a quiet rebuke to anyone waiting for conditions to improve before starting.
Having a named recipient is what saves this from being a diary, and it is the structural detail most summaries miss. The description calls Covici the late Pascal Covici, which places publication after the man these pages were addressed to had died, and every entry is written to be read by a specific person who knew the writer well. That produces manners. Steinbeck explains himself, anticipates objections and occasionally performs a little, none of which he would bother doing for a private notebook, and the result is far more articulate than raw process notes usually are. What you lose is candor at the very bottom of the scale, since a letter is still a letter.
Davis Faces a Problem That White Space Once Solved
Jonathan Davis reads it, and the material creates a problem that print solves with white space. A book of dated entries relies on the eye to see where one letter stops and the next begins, and a continuous recording has no equivalent unless the production supplies one. Across nearly nine hours the effect is either a single sustained voice or a series of discrete days, depending on how the reading handles those seams. Nobody in the visible pool discusses this recording at all, which is unsurprising given that the oldest of the five comments predates it by twenty years and a second by four, so the format question is one you will answer for yourself.
The Facing Pages Themselves Are Not Here
The listing sells this under a shortened name. What appears is Journal of a Novel, while one four-star reviewer twice writes it out in full as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, which is the form that actually tells a browser what the book contains. Without the subtitle the title reads as fiction, and a listener could reasonably buy nine hours of correspondence expecting a novel about a novel. Anyone shopping for Steinbeck's fiction should be clear that no story is being told here in the ordinary sense.
Prior reading changes the value enormously. Most of the enthusiastic notices attached to this listing come from readers who already loved East of Eden, and the same four-star reviewer describes reading it first in 2008 and carrying the intention to reach these letters ever since. Coming to the journal cold means hearing months of deliberation about characters you have never met. That is not fatal, since the craft material stands alone, but roughly half of what makes the daily entries gripping is the pleasure of recognition, and that half is unavailable to a newcomer.
One absence shapes the whole listening experience. The facing pages, the novel itself, are not here. You get nine hours of a writer limbering up and none of the thing he was limbering up for, which is exactly right as an artifact and occasionally frustrating as an experience, particularly when an entry ends on the note that he is now going to go and write the scene he has just spent a page dreading. Print readers can at least reach for the novel on the same shelf. A listener has to hold two purchases in mind, and the recording does nothing to bridge them.
A Great Writer Explaining How He Writes, Daily
Practicing writers are the natural audience and the ideal one. Anyone in the middle of a long project will find the anxiety here familiar in a way that is genuinely consoling, and the routine described is concrete enough to steal from. Novelists, screenwriters and long-form nonfiction authors get the most; students of Steinbeck get a primary source with almost no self-mythologizing in it.
East of Eden readers form the second group, and they should treat this as a companion rather than a sequel. A one-line summary from one five-star notice, a great writer explaining how he writes, is exactly right, and readers who loved the novel will find the insight into the author's thinking worth the nine hours on its own terms.
Skip it if you want narrative, if the domestic detail sounds tedious rather than humanizing, or if you have not read the novel and do not intend to. Also skip it if you need your literary heroes decisive: a great deal of this is a major novelist worrying, out loud, in writing, five days a week, about whether the thing he is making will work.
