How first-time novelist Lindsay Hatton expertly trolled John Steinbeck

The Monterey Bay author just fought one of America's most acclaimed authors — and won

Lindsay Hatton expertly entwines the past and present in Monterey Bay.
(Image credit: KIKE CALVO Visual&Written/Newscom)

There's a line that really stuck with Lindsay Hatton while reading John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden: "I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart." It's a sentence so patronizing it stings. And Hatton's new novel — Monterey Bay, out this week from Penguin Press — spanks Steinbeck back to life with it.

Monterey Bay jackknifes back and forth between 1940 and 1998, between the era when canneries were operative — when there were sardines and brothels and raucous parties thrown by Steinbeck and marine biologist-cum-philosopher Ed Ricketts in the latter's specimen-filled lab — and the era when both the men and the city had stiffened into hoary historical exhibits. In Hatton's prose, the Monterey of the '90s feels like it got stuck in one of Ed Ricketts' jars. Pickled into an expensively lifeless version of itself, the city's canneries conceal hokey restaurants. Monterey's only real vital spot is the aquarium, which, if it's arguably the biggest specimen jar in the world, is importantly different because it lets its contents grow and live.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.