The Nobel Prize winning author, John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968), published Of Mice and Men in 1937. It is a novella of about 100 pages and may easily be read in one sitting, as I did today out loud to my wife and my daughter who put off reading it until the night before it was due for her ninth grade English class. The edition I had in the house belonged to my son who had been forced to read it for an English class some six years prior. When my wife texted our son to let him know that we had all read Of Mice and Men, he replied simply, "I'm sorry." This Penguin Classics edition has a twenty-five page introduction by Susan Shillinglaw, the first page and a half of which is worth reading, the rest being a repetition ad nauseam of her first few paragraphs.In her introduction, Shillinglaw reveals that the original title for the novella was apparently "Something That Happened." It might just as well have been entitled "Life Sucks and Then You Die." She comments that Steinbeck, prolific and Nobel Prize winning though he might have been, was not and is not universally hailed as a master of his craft. While some critics saw Steinbeck's use of screenplay-like setting, plot, and character descriptions in Of Mice and Men as "experimental genius," others saw the same as cliche and melodramatic. Sadly, I fall into the latter category of critics.
The plot of this novella is painfully predictable from start to finish. I have seen episodes of Scooby Doo and Murder She Wrote that surprised me more. The use of foreshadowing is excruciatingly heavy handed--similar to when the camera zooms in on an important clue in Murder She Wrote.
The characters, while somewhat pitiable, are not particularly likable, and are the definition of cliche. We have the two main characters, George and Lennie, set up to be cliche foils of each other in a kind of cliche buddy movie. Then we have The Wise Cowboy, The Floozy, The Bully, The Nigger, and The Cripple. The book even ends with The Cowboy and George walking off into the sunset. Aaaargh!So, if you have not read Of Mice and Men or seen one of the three major motion pictures into which it was adapted, I say, "Good for you!" On the other hand, if you have no choice but to read this "classic" for an English class, I will echo my son in saying, "I'm sorry."
