Book 5: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

I'd had enough of angry reads, contemporary novels that rhapsodized rage, and mangled a plot so much that every page had to have some splintered cliffhanger so that it could be converted into a screenplay. I wanted to read something simple, full, and true. Like a classic. You don't realize how long you have gone without revisiting a classic until your mind starts feeling parched.

I picked 'Of Mice and Men' by John Steinbeck because it's still challenging for me to hit my stride with regular reading. Of Mice and Men is a short read, and although the language and dialect are specific to farm workers in 1930s California, one can follow through.

The story is about two men, George and Lennie, who work on farms as floating workers. Their goal is to collect enough money someday to buy a plot of land for themselves where they will retire. Lennie is large and slightly mentally challenged. He has the physical prowess of a beast and is unaware of it. He squishes mice and puppies with his bare hands because he cannot pet them tenderly and then spends the next few days crying over them. His friend, George, is a small-built, sharp-minded man whose job is to figure out which farms to work in, how to keep Lennie out of trouble, and scout around for the land that will one day be their ticket to freedom.

George and Lennie have always had each other and shared a common goal of owning something that will belong to them. George is usually wary of the world, but he softens when he talks about his dream. Lennie doesn't care too much about the specifics of his days as long as George is with him, and he will get his own chicken coop and rabbit brood in the future. The way the book begins - a description of the Salinas river in Soledad, its hillside bank where rabbits stand still like grey, sculptured stones, and the sycamore trees that arch around a beaten path - and the way Lennie keeps stroking a little mouse in his pocket so that the long, uncertain journey will be easier to undertake - this beginning is so idyllic that you know that this will not end well. And it doesn't.

In the end, George shoots Lennie in the back of the head near the same lake. Before Lennie falls to the ground, George tells him to look forward and recounts the dream of the land where they will live together. This act comes as a result of a few other incidents in the book. And there's a brilliant foreshadowing of this sentiment of letting go in a subplot.

Candy, another farmhand, cannot prevent his fellow workers from taking his old, blind dog into the field and shooting it. Much later, Candy tells George that he wished that he had shot his dog himself - at least his dog would have died at the hands of a man who took care of him. You wonder if George paid heed to this advice.

Steinbeck catalogs the loneliness of 'drifters' much like a musician makes music - sad as it may be, there's harmony.

Whether it is the yearning of a young woman who tries to flirt with men at the barn to escape the drudgery of her marriage or a man of color who can't join others in a game of euchre - it's a mellifluous backdrop to George and Lennie's companionship until a certain point. And even when Lennie's shot, he dies believing that George and he will tend to rabbits and chicken together until the end.

At one point, Steinbeck writes, "As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment. Then gradually time awakened again and moved sluggishly on." There is some respite to be had here - that even if there be devastation, may there be dignity in that.

At the end of the book, you wonder if George shot Lennie because he wanted Lennie to avoid a more brutal death (on account of some other events). Or had Lennie become too much of a burden? And it is equally telling how your heart will believe the more tender possibility when two reasons are equally possible. Why? I don't know. Maybe because you want to safeguard innocence. Even that loneliness was innocent, even that deceit was innocent, even that inevitable sorrow is innocent.

It's like that line in Oscar Wilde's 'The Reading Gaol':

"Yet each man kills the one he loves,

Let this by all be heard.

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a cruel word.

The coward does it with a kiss,

The hero with a sword."

And that's why I return to a classic after a slew of ghost stories and thrillers and 'noisy' novels. It reminds me that I can still feel.