The Novel That Broke Me Open on Page 400

I read East of Eden over three weeks and was managing my expectations carefully because long novels about American families often disappoint me in the third act. This one did not. Steinbeck's multigenerational story of the Trask and Hamilton families in the Salinas Valley builds to a single chapter about the Hebrew word timshel, meaning thou mayest, and the argument that the word makes about human freedom and responsibility is the most important thing I have read in fiction.