Of Mice and Men: Book Review

I just finished reading Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. This is a reread of the book, given I read it some time ago when I was a teenager. I generally did not read any of the required books at school, so I am not sure if this is one of the few that I did end up reading, or if I read it later in my free time. Either way, I knew what I was getting myself into from the outset, and I can say that I got the reference from the fourth season of The Walking Dead, when that came out. If you didn't get it, just go outside and look to the flowers.

This book is written about two men in the Great Depression. They are consigned by circumstances to walk the landscape for any odd job they can find, just so they can make ends meet. But behind all that is a dream. The American Dream: where the two of them can be wholly self-sufficient, livin' offa the fatta the lan'. They will have their own tract of land, their own food production, and won't have to answer to any one. This ideal embodied much of the thinking in America during the push to the west.

The complications arise from the pair of men. One is short and clever, and ever temperamental—though with a caring streak that colors his decisions throughout the story. The other is mentally retarded in a time where such conditions were not formally acknowledged. He is a large man with the mind of a child. He cannot live on his own, especially in a world like this, and he finds himself at the center of many controversies due to his inability to grasp the context and consequences of his actions.

The story is an unflinching look at the failings of American society at the time, and how little control people have over their lives.

Conclusion (No Spoilers)

Overall, I thought this story was near perfect. There were some parts that could have been tweaked, but they were minor quibbles. The story is a brutal and frustrating tale that forces you to confront the inherent limitations that people often find themselves in. Later stories, like The Wire, follow a similar theme, so I would encourage those who have read this book to check out a more modern story following a similar idea.

I thought about giving this book a perfect score, which would be my first ever (ignoring the rating I gave for the first third of The Stand). But there are a few things in the story that I think will bring the rating down. And I've also realized that a less than perfect story, especially an epic, might affect me more than a short one like this. It's rather hard to be perfect when you're writing a 300,000 word epic, and rather easy for a novella.

I think I will give this story a 9/10.

Spoiler Thoughts

Character

George and Lennie are at the center of this story, and I think they were both well handled by Steinbeck.

George is probably the most complex character in the story. His heart is evident in that he is traveling with this sharply disabled man who is utterly unable to take care of himself. The amount of trouble that George has to endure is stunning, and the fact that he continues to endure despite the backstory provided and the taxing interactions that he has with Lennie on screen shows that he cares. And this is taken alongside his obvious frustration with Lennie. He has a short temper and is often exasperated by Lennie, and he even laments the fact that he isn't traveling alone. Most of all: this is understandable.

This is further complicated by the backstory we get, when George admits to tormenting Lennie just for the kick of it, until he has a change of heart. Quite literally, Lennie doesn't grasp what George does to him, instead thanking him and claiming that George really does care. It truly shows just how helpless Lennie is in this world, and further, how George largely reflected the attitudes of many at the time.

And another thing that I quite appreciated was how Steinbeck did not hold back with his portrayal of George's frustration with Lennie. When I work at the bookstore, I often see intellectually disabled people come in with helpers on hand so they can look at books or video tapes. You can imagine the idea. Yet, imagine if one of those helpers ranted at their friend in the way that George did. People would be horrified, and the helper would be promptly fired. This is not to short a character like George. People are invariably embedded within the social circumstance of their time. Abraham Lincoln supported sending the freed slaves back to Africa, and he could have possibly supported things like Jim Crow (though the latter is speculation). What this does show is how the times have changed, and how the main character we perceive as truly good would essentially be a villain in our lives.

Steinbeck's reasoning for this very well could have been him simply reflecting the times, in his own right, but the writing choices still made me think.

Lennie was another character that really stood out to me. In contrast to George—and the very idea of complexity, itself—Lennie is decidedly simple. As he is suffering from mental retardation, he is basically a child in a monstrous man's body. He is characterized by the consequences of this incapacity alone: the obsession with soft things, misunderstanding his strength, and the inability to comprehend social cues.

What particularly stood out to me, though, was how Steinbeck portrayed the character. I genuinely felt like the character was real. It didn't stoop into the cartoonish, nor was it artificial. I think much of it came down to Lennie's fixation on petting soft animals and how his whole ethic was basically centered on this. His entire life was based on whether he was going to be able to tend to the rabbits in their little house.

The pinnacle of his portrayal was during the climactic scene with Curly's wife, when she lets him pet her hair. The way he panics when she reacts to his roughness, the way he starts begging her to keep quiet—only to grow angry, as if she were doing him some wrong. Every step of the way, the story communicates Lennie's misunderstanding and his simplicity in a way that is completely believable.

Finally, for the character discussion, I really liked how the backstory was given. There wasn't an excessive amount detailed, and there are a lot of gaps in what we know, but we have enough. We don't know why George is with Lennie beyond apparently promising Lennie's Aunt, but that only opens more questions. In the end, we don't need to know. We know enough for the story to work and for the characters to mean something to us.

Theme

The backbone of this story is the theme. Set in the Great Depression, there was no greater time that the American Dream was under this much scrutiny, if it wasn't being outright rejected. I outlined the theme above: the notion of being self-sufficient and having to answer to no one else. The idea ties neatly in with the individualist ideology that Americans have toted for centuries.

The notion, strictly speaking, has always been a myth. All people in a society depend on others, one way or another. Even a pair of "self-sufficient" farmers who plant their own food, etc. still depend on a government to protect their land and create the economic base they might depend on if they want to sell excess. But the appeal of relative self-sufficiency—where you didn't have to answer to an employer, and where you can truly enjoy the fruits of your own labor at your own discretion—was very appealing to Americans.

Of Mice and Men is pretty clear that this dream will only ever be a dream. The conditions of America at the time simply won't allow for it. (I guess this does ironically show how naive strict self-sufficiency really is, given that these conditions would have to be met in the first place, lol). But the book also shows how appealing the dream is, even to the most cynical of people. Namely, Crooks.

The book implies that George technically did not really believe it, at least in the beginning. It was just a narrative that he used to appease Lennie and keep his worst tendencies in check. Eventually, George saw it as only that: a cute story for Lennie. But when Candy offers to throw in and help the two of them, the dream looks almost possible. Even George has a moment of hope as he realizes that it might happen . . .

This book resonates as strongly as it does because it cuts right to heart of America's problems, especially at the time that it was written.

Perspective

The story is written in the omniscient perspective, as opposed to first person or limited third person. Stories like this often struggle with becoming cluttered, as the characters' thoughts are all spelled out—overwhelming the reader. But Steinbeck manages to avoid this by generally avoiding most people's thoughts. At the same time, he doesn't avoid the mental content of people altogether. He simply describes them in an objective way, the same as describing their actions.

This would contrast with someone like McCarthy, who never accesses the mental states of his characters, except under specific structural conditions (I'm thinking of No Country, here). McCarthy might just describe a character sitting on a bed for a time, implying that they are thinking things over with no detail whatsoever, while Steinbeck would at least tell the reader what is on their mind (even if he isn't showing it).

I think that Steinbeck hits the sweet spot. Of course, I prefer third person limited overall, but I think the omniscient view is best handled by Steinbeck, in comparison to someone like Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy. Stephen King is too omniscient, covering too many perspectives in the same scene and giving too much knowledge from the past and the future; McCarthy gives little to no perspective at all, with mental states only barely being hinted at through actions; Steinbeck describes mental states objectively, and balances it so the reader isn't overwhelmed by the thoughts of every character in the room.

While reading, I also got the impression that the book was written almost like a movie. Even more particular, in some of the reviews I read, some suggested that this book was written like a play, which neatly conceptualized what I was feeling while reading.

The comparison to a movie comes from Steinbeck's tendency to set the scene location before introducing the characters involved. He will describe a creek and the movements of life for a paragraph or so, before a character comes crashing in, setting the events into motion. You can imagine a scene very reminiscent of a movie, with the camera opening on some landscape, only for a character to come rushing into view. The openings of the original Star Wars and The Dark Knight are much like this.

With regard to the feeling that the book was written like a play, this is because the scenes weren't necessarily active. There was a lot of people sitting in rooms talking, as opposed to major movements from one location to the next in the context of one scene. A particular location was set, only for characters to move in and out of that established location, very much like a play that won't allow for much mobility.

And it turns out that these latter observations were correct. Steinbeck wrote the book to function both as a play and a novel. Indeed, there is a play adaptation. (And a movie one).

(Also, as a fun fact. Steinbeck's first and only copy of his novel was eaten by his dog, lol. This is why I regularly save three copies of my own. Thank goodness for technology, right?)

Passing Critiques

There were some places where I felt that the prose was a little workmanlike, particularly when Lennie accidentally kills Curly's wife. The description almost felt like a report on what happened in those final moments. Obviously, I'm not demanding an elaborate description of her neck breaking—this isn't an action flick—but it was a point where I would have preferred a description more grounded in Lennie's perspective, rather than Steinbeck just informing the reader at the end.

Another occasional problem, emphasis on "occasional," would be the redundancy in which information was given to the reader. Some of the information could have been cut because the context cues would have filled that gap in just fine.

Conclusion

Overall, the story was great. I will give it a 9/10.