‘East of Eden,’ Even With a Magnificent Florence Pugh, Is Far From Television Paradise

Return trips to Eden — the scene of the first crime — are rarely joyful affairs. Consider John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” published 285 years later, strikes a comparatively catastrophic chord. The book is commonly reckoned Steinbeck’s best, and its author said that “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.”Now comes a Netflix adaptation of the American epic. This “East of Eden” is adapted by Zoe Kazan. Her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed a 1955 film version starring James Dean. The intergenerational dimension is appropriate. Steinbeck’s novel tells the story of two families — the Trasks and Hamiltons — whose lives unfold across California’s Salinas Valley. The geography stretches from Connecticut to the Golden State, and the book’s chronology ranges from the Civil War to the First World War.The television edition stars Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, who staggers, broken and bloody, into the lives of the half-brothers Charles and Adam Trask. The brothers already carry their own scars from their tyrannical father, Cyrus, who tells tales of Gettysburg and, like a biblical patriarch but without the attendant moral grandeur, picks favorites and parcels out destinies. Steinbeck — and Kazan — capture the adolescent anxiety of 19th-century America.The fate of the brothers, though, is sealed not by their patriarch but by their paramour. Ms. Pugh plays Cathy as a paragon of innocence gone sour. Cue Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s remark regarding an attack on a synagogue during his campaign for Senate — “hurt people hurt people.” Ms. Pugh’s face is a marvelous canvas that quickly becomes cover for a sequence of crimes, all in the service of a relentless need to survive a world hardly built for her flourishing.Ms. Pugh is onscreen for what seems like the entirety of the show’s seven episodes, yet Cathy never quite comes into focus. That blurriness is the result of a character who never coheres because her desires are inconstant. Sometimes Cathy is played as a girlboss avant la lettre, chafing against the constraints of marriage and childbirth in search of financial independence, a goal she extols with the earnest vigor of an assiduous reader of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.”At other times, Cathy is akin to a character from 19th-century Gothic fiction or Christopher Nolan’s dark pantheon of villains who yearn for nothing more than to see the world burn. Cathy’s character matters because nearly everyone else in the miniseries appears to alternate between passivity and inefficacy. So much so that “East of Eden” becomes an extended treatment of the question of choice — who has it, who forfeits it, and why it maddens.This theme is addressed explicitly through a series of conversations about Genesis’s story of the first siblings, Cain and Abel. After God rejects Cain’s offering, He tells the seething supplicant that “if thou doest not well, sin coucheth at the door; and unto thee is its desire, but thou mayest rule over it.” The Hebrew for “thou mayest rule” is timshol, a word that becomes a talisman in “East of Eden” for the blessing of choice — and its burden.The rare moments when the camera is forced to relinquish Ms. Pugh — her journey to becoming a brothel impresario is the story’s most detailed arc — allow other talents to shine. Lee (Hoon Lee) is a Chinese American man who manages a household because the world into which he is born cannot handle his talents. Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds) is an Irish immigrant to the American West. He blends the best of the frontier and the Old Country.“East of Eden” is in no small part about the inheritances that come with being American, and that is true of the more recent arrivals Lee and Hamilton as it is for the Americans whose fathers fought — allegedly — alongside Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Steinbeck writes in broad strokes, but his material was locally sourced. His grandfather — Samuel Hamilton — was born at Co Derry and moved to the Salinas Valley, where Steinbeck grew up.Visions of violence marked Steinbeck’s inheritance. His paternal grandfather, Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, was a millenarian Christian who founded Mount Hope, a farm near Jaffa in Palestine, in 1853. Its aim was to hasten the Second Coming by teaching Jews to work the Holy Land. Five years later, Arab attackers killed Großsteinbeck’s brother and raped his brother’s wife and mother-in-law. In 1966 Steinbeck, the Pulitzer and Nobel winning author, visited the site in Israel.“East of Eden” has never lacked for readers. It was a smash bestseller upon its release, and it rocketed back when Oprah Winfrey endorsed it in 2003. Ms. Winfrey reckoned that the book is “not like Shakespeare, or even Faulkner; it’s reader-friendly.” Maybe so, but the book and Ms. Kazan’s adaptation are both wise to the seams of sin and sublimity that snake under America’s skin. Ms. Kazan, among others, has felt “atomically rearranged” by its power.

‘East of Eden,’ Even With a Magnificent Florence Pugh, Is Far From Television Paradise

‘East of Eden,’ Even With a Magnificent Florence Pugh, Is Far From Television Paradise

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