I finished reading Of Mice and Men last night. Its very short length belies the emotional impact of Steinbeck’s obliquely named novella. Though I had read it before, some twenty odd years ago, I found myself hazy on the details, and I decided to read it again.
And I think I may read it yet again. Not because it is one of those stories that will inspire or lift me, but because it moves and hurts. In just a few short pages, Steinbeck creates characters that are sympathetic, even though they are removed from my by almost a century and by several social and economic classes. Here we have George and Lennie, itinerant laborers, hoping to find enough money to break the cycle of boom and bust; the lonely African-American in the West, equal, but separate; Candy, the aging ranch hand, who is one step from useless and fearing cast off; Curly, suspicious and jealous, wearing high-heeled boots to compensate for his self-doubt; Slim, the experienced mule drive and really the only person who seems at peace with what he is; and Curly’s wife, the only woman in the book, but not even named. Each has a moment to feel potent and real, and then is subsumed into the symphony of Steinbeck’s tragedy, each having a hope torn asunder in a moment.
I don’t know quite what it all means. I don’t know what Steinbeck was saying. But there is a terrible beauty in the tragedy it spells out in just a few short pages that leaves one feeling the pain that must have been all too common in the years after the Great Depression. As a snapshot of an era, of one gone by the wayside, it feels like a glance, a glimpse through gently parted curtains, into what must have been the daily drama of the day.
I think leads me to why I would read it again, someday: to remind me how lucky, how blessed, how fortunate I am, not because of many efforts of my own, but so much because of the accident of my birth, when and where and to whom it happened.
Of Mice and Men
Fiction
1937
Paperback
119
They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.
Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.
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