The ultimate novella. I strongly recommend that people read Of Mice and Men. Yes, I know we all already read it in school, but every single book we read back then is worth rereading so that we may have our own reactions to it and form our own opinions on it without worrying about scouring lines to quote in a five-paragraph essay. Of Mice and Men in particular rewards rereading because it’s densely packed with stuff you might have not have noticed the first time through. Sometimes in English class we missed the trees for the forest— a lot of lovely details faded out of mental prominence to make way for the themes and symbols that tied our essays together.
George’s promise to Lennie of a Pokémon or Pikmin paradise of multicolored rabbits. George’s scorn toward “mean little guys.” George’s paranoia about lice. While some stuff we focused on in class is also gold, like the bizarrely adoring introduction of Slim, to pick something from early on, there’s plenty more going on that brings the world of these migrant workers to life— which is important because I tend to imagine it as dry, brown, and miserable. Hell, even if it really was that way, Steinbeck still nailed this medium sure as the apple boxes over the workers’ bunks to make two shelves— this book is remarkably complex and exciting for one hundred pages. Everything is connected, dog. Lennie and Candy and Candy’s dog and Crooks. You can smell Candy’s dog through the text.
The first substantial conversation between George and Slim sounds a lot like therapy for ranch hands in the 1930s. Pulp magazines get a shout-out at one point in a scene that really drives home the poverty and desperation— a literary celebrity to these guys is someone… whose barely literate fan letter gets printed in a magazine.
The most famous emotional peak of the book is the tragic ending, which was foreshadowed in multiple ways, where George takes advantage of Lennie’s trust to get a clean shot at the back of his head and put him out of his misery so he doesn’t have to go on any longer in a world that can’t handle him. However, for my fifty bucks a month, there’s an even better emotional peak: where George and Candy make the plan to pool their money and buy their own land, and it begins to actually seem possible for the dream to come true. Of course if the reader has been paying a lick of attention up till now they know that things are about to get totally fucked! It doesn’t matter how sunny it gets in the valley, it’s a realm of doom where dreams go to die. You have Curley’s wife fluttering around like a mythical succubus (though many have correctly argued she’s one of the real victims here) and she also points out that money is bullshit because if a ranch hand gets some he’ll just drink it away. And everything gets ruined in just a couple days!
I wonder if this book has become a culture war touchstone, what with all the potential homoerotic readings of it? (“A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long he’s with you.”)