The Four Winds A Mixed Effort

The Four Winds (2021)

Kristin Hannah

St. Martin's Press, 464 pages.

★★★

 

 

It’s risky when contemporary authors try to update classical literature. When done well, the results sparkle and refresh; when botched, readers wonder what tempted them to go where angels fear to tread. Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds is inspired by John Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath and lands in mid-spectrum between success and failure. At its best moments, it makes us feel the utter despair of being trapped in the Great Dust Bowl, perhaps the greatest eco-disaster in American history.

 

The Dust Bowl (1930-36) saw winds howl across the Great Plains and rip away the topsoil. To give a measure of how bad they were, in April 1935, the noonday sun in Boston, Washington, and New York was blackened out by dust that originated in Montana. Small farmers simply could not survive year after year of drought, which is why the Okies and Arkies of Steinbeck’s tale packed their possessions into rickety trucks and headed for California. 

 

 Hannah's twist is that her protagonists are from West Texas, a place often overlooked in Dust Bowl narratives. We first meet Elsa Wolcott in 1921, she the daughter of uppity, parents who told her she was too plain for anyone to desire. Their self-righteous cruelty drives her into the arms of Rafe Martinelli, who impregnates her. The two best things to come out of were a daughter, Loreda, and finding acceptance in the home of Rafe’s parents, Tony and Rose, who become surrogates for Elsa’s parents, who disowned her. Elsa never dreamed of being a farmer’s wife, let alone being part of an Italian household radically different from that of her formative years. Soon, another child, Anthony, joined the extended family. If this sounds a tad too sentimental, you’re right.

 

Jump ahead to 1934, when Loreda is 12 and Anthony 7. It is a year of hunger, desperation, and dust so thick that schools close, animals starve, and dirt flies into the house through every crevice. Tony remains optimistic that the rains will come, but Rafe doesn’t believe it. He begins to drink and dream–seldom a good combination. One day, he simply disappears, which is the last thing a daughter on the cusp of teenhood needs from a father whom she idolizes.

 

Hannah’s writing is at its most vivid when describing the horrors of the Dust Bowl. She places readers inside a ruined landscape in which machinery, outbuildings, and even livestock disappear under mounds of dirt. Imagine tornadoes filled with topsoil. One by one, farmers pack it in and head for California. When rain doesn’t come, Elsa and her children join the westward sojourners, though Tony and Rose stay put. This middle third of the book is Hannah’s strongest.

 

Many Dust Bowl stories discuss jalopies, hungry travelers, and makeshift campsites of American refugees from their own country. Hannah reminds us of less-discussed dangers along the way: theft, muggings, and sexual assault, to name a few. The experience of arriving in California is a scene straight out of a Woody Guthrie song. (Listen to his “Do Re Mi.”) If you think of the treatment of Latino immigrants today, that’s how Dust Bowl refugees were treated: backbreaking work, hostile locals, filthy camps, take-it-or-starve pay, and company store schemes that turn laborers into wage slaves. Back in Texas, Tony and Rose barely survive, but New Deal programs offer some hope.

 

As the calendar turns to 1936, conditions in California deteriorate and anger rises. At this juncture, Hannah introduces Jack Valen, a Communist Party (CPUSA) organizer. This is the weakest part of the novel. Hannah correctly surmises the inherent conservatism of bosses and migrants alike, but once Valen is placed within Elsa’s and Loreda’s sphere, you can probably storyboard a sizable chunk of this part of the novel. CPUSA organizers were unsung heroes during the hardest years of the Depression, but Hannah’s labor strife sections founder in a sea of one-dimensional situations and carboard cutout characters. This is compounded by the moving contrasts between individual tragedies and the shorter shrift given to collective tragedy and politics. Moreover, characters often speak and act in anachronistic ways that make it obvious that Hannah has contemporary border migrants in mind. The mood of the coda also feels like today dressed in 1940 garb.

 

Forgive the cliché, but The Four Winds is no Grapes of Wrath. Oddly, one of the reasons is that Hannah’s search for modern-day relevance dulls the vibrancy of the novel’s middle sections. I liked The Four Winds, but it reminded of a “B” student essay that squandered “A” material.

 

Rob Weir