Overall, it's just not very good. I keep debating whether I should rate it one star or two, but ultimately the Goodreads definition of the two-star rating, "it was ok," pushes me over the edge. It wasn't ok; nothing about this was ok.

The writing style is bad, though I haven't read enough Steinbeck to know whether his stilted, awkward prose is just an affectation for this work (in an insulting attempt to illustrate that his main characters are poorly educated), or whether he is just always like this.

His treatment of his characters is truly awful. Steinbeck strikes me as the worst kind of liberal; he's full of compassion for the circumstances of his characters, but that compassion never rises above the level that any of us would have for a sick animal. At least in this work, he seems like the kind of person who loves the poor, but only for the fact that they're poor. In short, he doesn't seem to think of his characters as people, just creatures buffeted by terrible circumstances.

And the moral of the story is nearly reprehensible, to the extent that it makes any sense. The reason bad things are happening to these poor creatures? They wanted a better life. Steinbeck seems to be saying, "don't try to do anything to improve yourselves, and you certainly should never dream. Be satisfied with where you are, because trying only leads to failure." If his moral were something like "money doesn't bring happiness" it would be fine, but this is more insidious, because he never even gives his characters the option of being poor and happy. His choice is a stark "poor and miserable" or "poorer and more miserable." I can just see Steinbeck rewriting the Horatio Alger stories: a sad, poor boy tries to pull himself up by his bootstraps, but the bootstraps snap, and he falls off a cliff, breaks his neck at the bottom, and his corpse is eaten by syphilitic bears.

If you like heavy-handed stories with a poor moral sense and bad writing... you can still do better than "The Pearl."