The New York Times Reads Steinbeck's Villain, and the Purists Who Object

The New York Times turned its arts pages this week to Netflix's adaptation of East of Eden, and specifically to the treatment of Cathy Ames by the writer Zoe Kazan and the actor Florence Pugh. The paper's headline calls the character recognisably human, and its standfirst reports that the nuanced take has rankled Steinbeck purists precisely by making her a person.

The dispute is an old one in adaptation criticism. Steinbeck's Cathy is among American fiction's most thoroughly condemned figures, and a screen version that grants her interiority changes the moral accounting of the novel rather than merely updating it.

The Times frames the disagreement as a matter of interpretation rather than fidelity, which is where most arguments about literary adaptation end up. The paper does not report viewing figures or production detail in the passage at hand; its subject is the reading the adaptation proposes.

The Italian stake in this is indirect but real. Steinbeck's novel is a book about inheritance and the weight of a family's past, and Italian readers have long taken to American fiction of that kind; the country's own literary tradition is saturated with dynasties, patrimonies and the question of what a parent passes down.

More concretely, the argument the Times reports is one Italian criticism knows well. When a director or a screenwriter recovers a character the author meant us to condemn, the response at home tends to split along the same lines: those who read it as interpretation and those who read it as correction. The Cathy Ames quarrel is a clean example of that split, and it is being conducted in the open in an American paper of record.

The Times piece also illustrates how adaptations now enter the culture. A Netflix release reaches viewers in Italy and the United States on the same day, and the critical conversation around it is increasingly written in English and read everywhere. The paper's decision to lead on the character rather than the production is a judgment about what its readers will argue about.

Nothing in the report establishes where the series was made or whether Italian talent was involved, and this desk will not supply that. What can be reported is the terms of the disagreement: a writer and an actor have chosen to make a notorious figure comprehensible, and the paper has recorded that the choice has a cost among readers who want her left as Steinbeck drew her.

For the culture desk the story is a reminder that the traffic in literary reputation runs both ways. American fiction is read and argued over in Italy, and the arguments about how to adapt it are now conducted in a common English-language forum. The Times has staked out one side of that argument, and the purists it quotes have staked out the other.