"The Wrath of Grapes"

In yesterday's New York Times story about how people are moving to cities like Oklahoma City because the housing prices are cheaper, there's a particularly interesting passage:

     “A large percentage of Americans had to read ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” 
     said Mayor Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City, referring to the John Steinbeck 
     novel that chronicled the flight of Oklahomans to California in search of 
     a better life during the Depression. Now the grandchildren and great-
     grandchildren of those migrants are returning for the same reason. 
     “It’s ‘The Wrath of Grapes,’ ” he said.

What Shaila Dewan (the author of this piece) - and maybe the mayor of Oklahoma City, too - doesn't seem to take into account is that in the novel, this "flight," this move "in search of a better life," is compelled - unless you wanted to live like Muley, a character as stubborn as the animal he shares a name with, you fled because the bank made you. Sure, there were aspirations of plentiful work, delicious fruit to harvest and eat, and houses with white fences in the promised land of California, but the dream of those aspirations was necessitated because of real distress, actual limited material conditions. After all, without a tractor plowing into your house, you wouldn't have to fantasize about a new one.

Similar echoes are heard in Dewan's interviews with people who have moved to Oklahoma: a woman who left Portland, OR, because "the beach isn't going to pay my rent"; a man who "had given up on the idea of home ownership in Seattle." It may not be as dire as the Dust Bowl, but it's not as innocuous as a simple "search" for a better life, either.

I don't mean to pounce on the wording in this piece; I know that the article's point is not to discuss The Grapes of Wrath. But how we distill stories matters and the NYT knows this from, to cite just one example, covering one school's teaching of The Great Gatsby and the reactions that followed. And I do think that beyond a mayor's perhaps playful dissing and boosterism, there's a fuller story to be told about the characters who left Oklahoma in the '30s and the ones who head there today.