Just Finished Reading Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

As I continued on my personal tour of some of American writer John Steinbeck's more famous works, I came across his 1945 Cannery Row, a lighter story than his usual deep social commentary.  It's about a street...hence the title...in Monterrey, California, a location intimately known by the author.  Sardine canning companies line it, and other residents live there: Lee Chong, the parsimonious local grocer, community-minded Dora and her brothel, a group of derelict men led by Mack...and then there's Doc, a marine biologist running his own business and who collects and sells samples of the local Pacific fauna from his laboratory there.  It's the interaction between these various characters that dictates the story's flow, highlighted by Mack's desire to do something nice for Doc and the mischief that follows this initial burst of good will.  Mack reminded me with his philosophy of life of Eliza Doolittle's vagrant father in My Fair Lady, the movie adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.  Initially when I read Cannery Row I felt that Steinbeck wrote Doc's character based on himself, but later I discovered that he based it on a friend who also had a biological laboratory there.  There is some drama in the story, but it's mostly a tale about many clearly-flawed, very different individuals bound together within a community by their affection for one another and sense of belonging...and that's not so bad, is it?  I remember back in the early 1980s a Cannery Row movie starring Nick Nolte and Deborah Winger but I never got around to seeing it.  Cannery Row hops from character to character...the temptation is for me to crown Doc as the story's protagonist, but this novel really wasn't constructed that way: it was more a portrayal of this quirky, special town at a snapshot in history.  I thought it was pretty good reading...