Joe's Reviews > Of Mice and Men

What more can I possibly add to a discussion of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men without drawing a high school English teacher's salary? Considering I'm not drawing bored glances from teenagers, I doubt that a check from LAUSD will appear in my mailbox anytime soon.

-- Published in 1937, this is the work that the Goodreads algorithms seem to have agreed is the author's most renowned. For Stephen King, it's The Shining, for Elmore Leonard it's Get Shorty and for John Steinbeck it's Of Mice and Men.

-- This is a novella, approximate length 34,720 words. I read it in under forty-eight hours.

-- The story revolves around two ranch hands traveling the highways and ranches of California, looking out for each other and trying to build enough of a stake to put down on their own piece of land.

Both were dressed in denim trousers and in denim coats with brass buttons. Both wore black, shapeless hats and both carried tight blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.



-- George Milton is the small man, the thinker. Lennie Small is the child in a hulk's body. Walking ten miles to a barley ranch south of Soledad after a bus driver with a grudge drops them off on the highway far short of their destination, Lennie is fascinated by petting mice or rabbits or anything with a nice texture. Lennie has never laid a hand on George, enamored by the tales his traveling partner tells of the land they'll settle someday. When the men finally arrive for work, George does the talking.

"He ain't no cuckoo," said George. "He's dumb as hell, but he ain't crazy. An' I ain't so bright neither, or I wouldn't be buckin' barley for my fifty and found. If I was bright, if I was even a little bit smart, I'd have my own little place, an' I'd be bringin' in my own crops, 'stead of doin' all the work and not getting what comes up outta the ground." George fell silent. He wanted to talk. Slim neither encouraged nor discouraged him. He just sat back quiet and receptive.

-- One of the reasons John Steinbeck is my favorite author is that when he pens description, I don't want it to end, and when he switches to dialogue, I don't want his characters to stop talking either. Stephen King's dialogue can be tin, while Elmore Leonard's attentiveness when it comes to prose is short spanned to say the least, but Steinbeck's descriptions and dialogue achieve a purity that captivates me. It's like the difference between drinking water from a garden hose that's been drying in the sun with who knows what crawling inside it and one day, someone hands you a bottle of Perrier.



-- While most authors have been around people, with Steinbeck, I'm always left with the undeniable impression he watched and achieved a wisdom about people. Then he works that knowledge into his books and passes it along to the reader. I find myself able to relate to Steinbeck more than I can the majority of contemporary authors, who often seem to have never been around humans who dreamed, drank, lusted, got into fights or trouble with the law, fell out with family members or worried about where their next meal might come from.

Crooks said gently, "Maybe you can see now. You got George. You know he's goin' to come back. S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunkhouse and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that? S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books. Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody--to be near him." He whined, "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell ya," he cried, "I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

-- For those joining late, I'm no English teacher, but if I encountered someone who was adamant that they didn't read fiction (I'm thinking men here) and I wanted to try to get them to change their attitude, Of Mice and Men would be the novel I'd hand them. It's short, it's about men and work and figuring out a better future and loyalty and how things don't always work out the way you dream they will. Yet the writing takes me away to another place. I couldn't last a day bucking barley or bucking a sack of anything, but as Steinbeck knows well, we all yearn to be on the open road, traveling, camping out on a river and maybe eating beans just because we felt like it.

-- Lastly, Of Mice and Men has been adapted to film twice: a 1939 production starring Burgess Meredith as George and Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and a 1992 film with Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie. Reading the novel, I heard Sinise's voice as George. As Lennie, I heard the Abominable Snowman from the 1949 Looney Toons short directed by Chuck Jones, The Abominable Snow Rabbit. References to Steinbeck's novel have been dropped by a ton of cartoon series, perhaps as much a tribute to Jones as to Steinbeck, but the homage that stands out for me are the characters of Pinky and the Brain on Animaniacs.