Read Half of East of Eden Before Netflix
Netflix premieres its seven-episode East of Eden on Thursday, October 1, and the casting tells you what kind of adaptation it is. Florence Pugh plays Cathy Ames. Christopher Abbott is Adam Trask, Mike Faist is his brother Charles, Joseph Zada is Cal, and Hoon Lee plays Lee, the Trask family's servant and its conscience. Tracy Letts, Martha Plimpton and Ciarán Hinds round out the older generation. The show was created by Zoe Kazan, with Jeb Stuart as co-showrunner, and Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre split the directing.
The family history is the first thing everyone mentions. Kazan's grandfather is Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film of East of Eden that made James Dean a star. So the fan question for the next ten days has three possible answers. Read John Steinbeck's East of Eden first, watch the 1955 film, or go in cold.
Read the book, or at least its first half, where Cathy lives. She is the reason this series exists, and the famous film barely lets you meet her.
What the 1955 film leaves out
Elia Kazan's film adapts only the fourth and final part of Steinbeck's novel: the twins Cal and Aron growing up in Salinas, their father Adam, and the bean crop money Adam refuses. It is a great film. Dean, 23 at the time, plays Cal as a boy who cannot make his father love him, and it was the only one of his three leading roles released while he was alive, six months before the crash that killed him. It won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama.
But most of the novel is gone. TIME's Eliana Dockterman, in a profile of Zoe Kazan published last week, put it plainly: the film "covers only the last third, crucial characters have been excised, and famous lines are missing." Of her grandfather's version, Zoe Kazan told her: "It was less like the book than I remembered."
What went missing is mostly Cathy. In the novel she arrives in the Connecticut and Massachusetts chapters that open the story, marries Adam, travels with him to the Salinas Valley pregnant with twins, shoots him in the shoulder and walks out on her newborn sons. She goes to work in a Salinas brothel, renames herself Kate, murders the madam, Faye, and inherits the house. In the film she is already Kate when you meet her, running a brothel in Monterey, with a past you only hear about. Jo Van Fleet won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for that role. Pugh gets the entire character, from the start.
Why the book beats going in cold
Going in cold is a fair choice for most adaptations. Here it costs you something specific. Steinbeck built East of Eden as two generations repeating each other: Adam and Charles, a father's favorite and his resentful brother, then Aron and Cal doing it all again. Kazan told TIME that the power of the story is how, over 50 years, "it shows history repeating itself," and then she added "or not." That "or not" is the whole book. A seven-episode series has room for both generations, which the film never had, and you will feel the echoes harder if you have already read them once.
Then there is the word. Lee's long talks about the Cain and Abel story land on timshel, Hebrew for "thou mayest," the idea that a person gets to choose. It is the line fans of the book wait for, and you want to know it when it comes.
Steinbeck himself thought this was the one. Viking published the novel on September 19, 1952, 74 years ago last Saturday, and he wrote: "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this." Critics at the time called it heavy-handed. Readers pushed it to number one on the fiction bestseller list anyway, and Oprah's Book Club sent it back up the charts in 2003.
Your plan for the next ten days
It is a long book, so be honest with yourself about which reader you are.
- All in: start the novel on Monday, September 21, and read steadily. You want to reach the twins' childhood by the weekend of September 26 and finish the night before the premiere. You will watch Pugh knowing exactly what she is walking toward.
- Half in: read only the first half, through Cathy leaving Adam and becoming Kate. That is the stretch the 1955 film never touched, and it is Pugh's story. Save the Cal and Aron chapters for after.
- Film people: if you will not read, watch the 1955 film this week, then treat the series as the prequel and the full story Elia Kazan never shot. Skip the 1981 ABC miniseries for now. Jane Seymour won a Golden Globe for her Cathy, and the three-part, roughly six-hour version is worth a look later, but you do not need two Cathys in your head on October 1.
Our verdict: read at least the first half. Pugh has played a murderous young wife before, in Lady Macbeth, and a woman walking into her own ruin in Midsommar. Cathy Ames is the role those performances were pointing at, and you should meet her on the page before you meet her on Netflix.
If Steinbeck gets his hooks in you
The Grapes of Wrath is the book that won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940, and John Ford's film version with Henry Fonda came out the same year. Of Mice and Men is the short one, a single sitting, if the long novel scares you off, and Lewis Milestone's 1939 film is the classic screen version. And if Pugh is the draw, the rail below runs from Lady Macbeth through Little Women, the role that earned her an Oscar nomination, and The Wonder, on to Oppenheimer, We Live in Time and her Yelena in Thunderbolts.
