The Dear Idiot

[Steinbeck] makes the point that, after Adam and Eve, everyone is the son or daughter of some human parent. From the standpoint of family romance, the dilemma faced by our first parents is profoundly unique. Yet everyone who has been a human child has felt, Steinbeck argues, a common terror: “The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with “rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.” In this model of human development the key figure is not a parent or a child but a sibling, or the idea of one. The threat to the self is having to share love, and the root of all evil, if there is one, is the impulse that leads a parent to say, as Cyrus Trask does to Adam, “I love you better.”

The Bible can be read as a book about the mystery of favorite children. It has only one set of first parents but many Cains and Abels. Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, the elder son and the Prodigal Son, Satan and Christ—in each of these twosomes one is somehow lucky, or better, or preferred. But competition for love is finally not the issue here. Each story turns upon the arbitrariness and unpredictability of the parental response.