Exactly how steamy is this story?
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Whores, brothels, circuses in brothels with whores—this book does not shy away from sex in the slightest. This means that when a character does something like, say, contracts gonorrhea (also endearingly referred to as the Old Joe and the clap), you get to hear all about it. Hopefully you're more like Cal and less like Aron when it comes to innocence and naïveté, because Steinbeck tries to make it pretty clear when he's talking about sex.
But sex is also really important thematically to the novel (which is why we included it in our "Themes" section)—it's the thing that marks Adam's and Aron's falls from innocence, just like it does for the biblical Adam. What exactly do we mean by that?
(1) After the biblical Adam eats the Forbidden Fruit, he and Eve realize that they are naked, and everyone thereafter is cursed with embarrassing stress-dreams of going to school in their underwear. Nakedness here is a stand-in for sex and sexuality.
(2) Adam's moment of realization comes when Cathy the Perfect Wife becomes Kate the Gun-Totin' Whore. In other words, his supposedly-pure Eve is in fact a sex fiend.
(3) Aron's tragic moment comes when Cal shows him that his supposedly-pure and totally-imagined mother is, in fact, also said sex fiend from above.
See? We're not just talking about sex because it's sexy.