Year-end book lists may be boring, but one outlet’s pick for editor’s favorite in 2019 surprised fans familiar with John Steinbeck’s bumpy treatment by religiously-minded reviewers. Catholic News Agency, an affiliate of Eternal Word Television Network in Denver, Colorado, chose The Moon Is Down for reader attention in a December 31 round-up that includes a French priest’s commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, A Testimonial to Grace by American Cardinal Avery Dulles, and Three to Get Married by “not-so-soon-to-be-blessed Fulton Sheen,” the photogenic philosopher-bishop who hosted the popular TV show Life Is Worth Living in the 1950s. (CAN’s deputy editor-in-chief, Michelle La Rosa, paired Steinbeck’s 1942 novella-play with a 1990 novel, The Remains of the Day, by Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.)
Photo courtesy Catholic Herald/Catholic News Agency.
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I have long thought The Moon Is Down is a neglected masterpiece. It is a great work about what is happening in the world seemingly in the moment it is happening. The occupation of a Northern European town by the enemy. It was published in 1942 in the middle of World War II. In it, Steinbeck creates a world of betrayal then resistance. In it, he out Hemingways Hemingway, or at least gives him a good run for writing a compelling narrative wiithout an excess word. It has been, for me, a difficult book to put down once I pick it up. It is a continual warning as to how vulnerable we are to betrayal, it’s greatest theme, followed by resistance to that betrayal. And the betrayal can be in many aspects of our lives, not only war.
I have an art gallery and a Steinbeck section – he had many artists among his friends, something I’ve written about – and a few of his books are on a desk, including The Moon Is Down. Several times I have had visitors from Northern European or Scandanavian countries pick up the book, smile ironically and say playfully, “Oh, he’s not American, he’s Norwegian (you can substitue other countries), he knows us so well, what our country endured. He was definitely one of us.”