John Steinbeck- Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men

Penguin

John Steinbeck

1937

“A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.”

To a generation (or two) of millions upon millions of British adolescents, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is the absolute definitive piece of American literature, far ahead of anything else, whether it be grand novels Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby, or the tone of Ernest Hemmingway or Edgar Allen Poe. I honestly have no idea how the general American public view it; if whether it's considered as important as the aforementioned classics or indeed Steinbeck's other, longer works like The Grapes of Wrath, but over on my side of the Atlantic it's a definitive text for a pretty simple reason.

John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men was in my experience the most memorable of every text I was made to study alongside every other student in Britain as part of the mandatory GCSE teaching syllabus for English Literature taught in secondary school. Almost fifteen years later it's still a focal point of the course, and so now my younger sister has to study it. She asked me a few questions about it recently but I hadn't read it in so long that when I coincidentally saw a copy in my favourite used bookstore soon after I had to pick it up and relive it. At just over one hundred pages, I'd forgotten that its brevity makes it the perfect length for the mind of an easily-distracted fifteen-year-old.

All these years on, with the benefit of that much time to explore further some the vast array of classic North American novels available, Of Mice and Men still stands out to me as an amazing novella, both due to the power and emotion of its plot and through its symbolic representation of the major themes of the American novel, condensed into a compelling microcosm. The novella's plot is probably ubiquitously known to the point that spoilers warnings are pointless- in the destitute farmlands of California during the great depression, George Milton and Lenny Small desperately search for work from anywhere they can get it, living in poverty dreaming of owning their own small piece of land one day.

George is small, smart and capable, while Lennie is a giant with the mind of a child, and therefore the target for abuse and misaccusations from the paranoid struggling communities in which they travel. The two of them take a job on a farm in Monterrey County with its own cast of misfits and minorities, and Lenny becomes unwittingly embroiled in the marital problems of the farm owner's volatile son, Curley. Curley's bored and promiscuous wife enchants Lenny, but her failure to understand his fragile state leads to her accidental death by his hand. As Curley rounds up a gang to hunt Lenny to the death, George is left with the final decision as to Lenny's fate.

Compacted into such a short space, I found it to be an incredibly powerful, tense, and compelling novel from start to finish. Stylistically Steinbeck's prose is superbly crafted with just the right balance of minimalism in the dialogue and description in the narration to make it immensely readable (thoguh limited in comparison with other famous texts like Gatsby). The pacing and plot structure is also seemed extremely cinematic to me, thanks to Steinbeck's use of recurring motifs, and the constant foreboding sense of impending doom depicted in Lenny's repeated lack of understanding of his own incredible strength, as he despairingly kills each and every pet George gives him.

Though Lenny is the more memorable character, George is more important in relating the injustice of just about everything that happens in the story, and so his frustration felt as one with mine. At the end of the book, as George makes the fateful decision to end Lenny's pain and suffering once and for all, the culmination of all the bitterness surrounding the twisted morality of the situation left me with no easy answers. I will confess though, I remember when reading the book as an adolescent I found myself angry with George for taking what seemed to me to be a coward's way out- but this time I felt completely on his side. 

I think the answer to that is honestly a rather downbeat one, in the sense that the proceeding years of my life left me with a far more cynical outlook on the world, aided by the thematic conclusions of other American classics. Gatsby is the most obvious one, telling me that the poor will always remain poor, that Gatsby, Lenny and George were screwed before they were even born simply because of their origins. It's a sense of bitterness that's probably not mentally healthy, but can lead to great literary achievement. In the decades to follow, books like Post Office, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Naked Lunch would defy expectations of normal literature, but at their core challenge the concept of the American Dream.

 Steinbeck was far more conventional in structure than the beatniks and the hippies to come, but the combination of such a well-crafted, evocative story and its themes made it as enjoyable to me as they were. My regret is that my own unfamiliarity with Steinbeck's work outside of this novella makes it hard for me to write with more insight on the author's particular fixations. My enjoyment of Of Mice and Men this time has ensured that I'm going to one day rectify that and add another author to my reading list (so, give it about ten years for another Steinbeck review). I also have to finally commend the people or person who picked it to take such an important position in the UK as one of the primary introductions to US lit for millions of school children. And if you yourself were one of those once upon a time and remember not liking it, maybe give it another shot one day with older and (hopefully) wiser eyes.