Granted, there are suckier, less beloved books out there but, let’s be honest, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is as deeply flawed as it is effective. It does a lot of things we’re taught not to do as writers and still exists as a bestselling, thrice-filmed novella almost all of us have read at some point in our lives. So it must do something right, right?
I’ll admit that the book’s themes - dreams; companionship; misunderstanding - are universal and compelling and the two main protagonists are an emotional, if not entirely complex, draw. The first few descriptive pages are beautiful and its ending, arguably, accounts for one of the biggest WTF moments in American literature and leaves you genuinely moved. With deft stokes, Steinbeck creates a fascinating world of struggle, envy and solitude, where nobody really has what they desire but cling to the concept of The American Dream as though it might, deus ex machina-style, unfurl from the bleak Salinas skies and rescue them from back-breaking toil at any moment.
But - and this is a huge, Kardashian-sized one - it is so poorly written in places it makes me want to weep.
Granted, great writing and great storytelling are not the same thing (a painful truth, if ever there was one) but the writing here is often third rate, at best. Open it at any page and it’s Adverb City. ‘He glanced coldly at George and then at Lennie. His arms gradually bent at the elbows and his hands closed into fists. His glance was at once calculating and pugnacious. Lennie squirmed under the look and shifted his feet nervously. Curley stepped gingerly close to him.‘ Jesus wept. I know it was published deep in the Hemingway-era of sparse, iceberg American prose but the road to hell is paved with adverbs, as King famously said. Tear all those adverbs out and we can still, as readers, infer the danger inherent in the scene. They do nothing but render the writing timid and first-draft worthy.
Steinbeck chucks in adverbs as though they’ll never go out of fashion and the worst of them can be seen in his dialogue attributions. I opened the book at random just now and caught sight of: He said angrily; He repeated softly; George said wonderingly. That last one is the most grating of all. If the wonder’s not evident in the actual dialogue then rewrite the dialogue so it shows wonder, don’t tell us after the fact. Jerk.
There are other sins within the pages. You know about the major ones already. The profanity doesn’t bother me and the casual racism, it can be argued, is a reflection of the times. A book shouldn’t be banned (cancelled is the popular term today) because someone repeatedly calls a black character the N-word (this is the character’s racism, not the authorial voice) but the misogyny is harder to swallow.
The most important female character in the book doesn’t even have a name. Let that sink in. She is known only as ‘Curley’s wife’ and is sold to us as mere physical attributes and flirtation. Yes, this allows literature students to ponder over her parallels to Eve and what her red lipstick symbolises but, God almighty, it’s BAD WRITING. Even Lennie’s aunt, who’s dead long before the book begins, has a name.
Which brings me onto the most egregious no-no as far as creative writing tutors are concerned: the naming of characters.
Within a few short pages we are introduced to Crooks, Candy, Carlson, Curley, and the aforementioned Curley’s wife and Aunt Clara. What in the name of sanity is Steinbeck doing? How is anyone supposed to differentiate between these characters? Even introducing a character called Slim draws on a similar, sibilant phoneme. Get this man an editor.
I don’t know. I guess it’s sour Grapes of Wrath on my part that Nobel-winning Steinbeck got away with all this (or even the wrath of grapes; I’m writing this with a glass of wine), but it does at least seem to confirm that everything you’re told about how to write a novel is, at best, utter bollocks. And there’s comfort there, isn’t there? You can write badly and still sell millions. But I think we knew that anyway.
Right at the start I listed the things the book does well and mentioned the ending being an effective shock, but even that, after the final pages, begins to leave a foul taste as we are forced to consider the writer’s promotion of euthanasia or mercy killing as a preferable alternative to rehabilitation. This is controversial territory, but the Great Depression was harsh and mental illness wasn’t recognised the way it is now. California, unbelievably (I’m sticking by that adverb), still has the death penalty, eighty four years later, so maybe the resolution of the novel continues to work for the site-specific patch of unforgiving, disaffected land Steinbeck describes, with its dry sycamore trees and ‘strong and rocky Gabilan mountains’.
Yes, he really did describe mountains as ‘rocky’.
And on that I rest my case, your honour.
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