Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck

OF MICE AND MEN – JOHN STEINBECK

Am I the only person in the world who hasn't read Of Mice And Men before? Just a quick google search reveals universal acclaim for it but also reveals a near-universal declaration of having read it at school. Was it just my school, I wonder, that didn't have it on the curriculum that year? Swapping it instead for Lord Of The Flies and A Complete History Of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)?

Whatever.

'The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry', as Robert Burns once wrote, and that in a nutshell is what John Steinbeck’s book is about: The failure of plans to come to fruition. The smashing of dreams. The failure, in effect, of the American Dream.

There is the joy of sex but then there is the joy of books. A joy so inexplicable. A joy so hard to define and so impossible to explain to the illiterate because there simply are no words. It's a brainiac-amour, as Patti Smith would say.

Of Mice And Men is such a book that offers such pleasure. It's a joy to read. A book in which nothing much happens apart from the observing of lives being squandered before exploding into violence. It's a book carried by dialogue, by conversations held by men at the end of their tether. Men caught-up in the American Depression, working for a pittance from which others always prosper. Never able to rise above their station and nothing but troubles to occupy them.

The dialogue is natural and easy, spoken by characters both believable and sympathetic. The descriptive passages between conversations being lyrical visions in their own right. There's no moral to the story, no lessons to be gleaned; rather it's just a snapshot of some people's lives as they come together through circumstance then fall apart in similar fashion.

Whether they're black or white, man or woman, old and infirm or as strong as an ox, their lives are no different to that of a dog. And that, as Steinbeck shows us, is the great tragedy of it and the reality of the (American) dream.

John Serpico