Disappointment

I'm re-reading Grapes of Wrath and, while enjoying it, am also disappointed. What disappoints me is its poor storytelling efficiency, especially in the non-Joad chapters, which I find too often repetitive and over-written. I think you could take 20 or more pages out of this and lose nothing, in fact improve it. This is in great contrast to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men with its storytelling efficiency. So this one is not the masterpiece that I remember, though I still embrace it as "a good book." But it could have been better.