I’m so very tempted to write, “I read John Steinbeck’s ‘To a God Unknown,'” and leave it at that. It was a book, it had pages and I would say I enjoyed about half of it.

I was actually quite enthusiastic about this one, having chosen it from a stack of about five Steinbeck’s that were sitting unread on my shelf. The description spoke of a man going to California to set out on a new life along with mystical elements that include his father’s spirit embodying a tree on the new property. And that part was fine and nice and featured the typical Steinbeckian descriptions of the land that really help to put you firmly in that space.

But also, the mystical part, it got pretty weird. I could have done without the man the main character Joseph and his brother come across who lives on a cliff overlooking the ocean and celebrates the end of each day by sacrificing a small animal so that it dies just at sunset. Maybe more of Joseph and his friend, Juanito, trying to make lives for themselves and their new wives. Sure, every story can have some tragedy. But between one of Joseph’s brothers killing the tree that’s supposed to embody their father because he fears it’s un-Christian, and Joseph’s wife suddenly falling off a rock and snapping her neck, there was plenty of that to go around.

I will say this, I dog-eared a paged in the aftermath of Elizabeth’s death that stopped me for a while. Steinbeck talks about Joseph going back to his house and living in those first minutes, hours and days without her.

“The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it — Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead.”

If you are in the market for Steinbeck with elements of sadness and tragedy, he wrote The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. Those are beautiful stories that span the range of human emotion and bring so much to the table. Happier tales abound in his catalog.