Review: Zoe Kazan's 'East of Eden' centers Steinbeck's dynamic Cathy with an impressive Florence Pugh

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Set us as preferred John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel “East of Eden,” an Oprah’s Book Club Selection in 2003, is a retelling, or actually two retellings, of the Cain and Abel story, first in Connecticut with half-brothers Charles and Adam Trask, and then in the author’s native Salinas Valley with Adam’s fraternal twin sons, Cal and Aron, in each case competing with one another for their father’s love.Not wanting you to miss his meaning, if you haven’t already guessed by the title, Steinbeck has a character read the entire passage from Genesis.The stories, which together run from the late 19th century through World War I, are connected by a woman named Cathy Ames, whom Adam marries and who gives birth to Cal and Aron — which I suppose makes her the Eve in this household, though that’s not a theological road Steinbeck chose to really explore.In 1955, Elia Kazan directed a film version, a color-mad Cinemascope melodrama that told only the Cal and Aron part of the story; significantly, it was the film debut of James Dean and so will live forever.

Writing in The Times in 2005, Kenneth Turan called it “not only one of Kazan’s richest films and Dean’s first significant role” but “arguably the actor’s best performance.”Kazan’s granddaughter Zoe Kazan has written the screenplay and worked with Jeb Stuart as co-showrunners for a new “East of Eden” adaptation, a seven-episode miniseries debuting Thursday on Netflix.Though it omits a sizable chunk of what is after all a very long book, it takes its chronology whole, putting Cathy front and center in the publicity and in the show, owing largely to Florence Pugh‘s performance as its most dynamic character.Kazan begins her telling with a badly beaten woman dragging herself through the night as a female voice delivers an edited, elaborated version of th...