Readers read bestselling novels to have their hearts broken. That's the dirty little secret. There's more to it than that, of course. But that's the secret. (I'm a writer and I just told you the secret, so my headline is a lie. No matter. It served its purpose, to entice you to read this essay. I hope you aren't offended by this.)
In order to work their magic, writers entice readers to fall in love with their characters. They want to have their readers' hearts to go all aflutter as they imagine how wonderful this story will be, as they emotionally invest in the story, and become captivated by in, engage their imaginations to, in a sense, make it their own.
Soon though, the writer intervenes, turns the story and smashes readers' hopes to smithereens. A good writer breaks readers' hearts by the millions. In the wreckage, the writer reveals the truth. Some of the more incontrovertible truths writers employ: Everyone dies. Everyone lies. The flesh is weak. Everything falls apart. We try to live our lives as though they are fortresses when in fact each of us is nothing but a grain of sand washed up on a foreign shore. Each of us is a stranger in a strange land.
In John Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men, "angry John" who, when he was alive and writing, as one critic had it, was "the most pissed-off writer in America," pushed this model to the extreme. His restless, compulsive pushing came out of his rage. In the end that's what made Steinbeck great and what he'll be remembered for.
As the novel opens we meet George & Lenny, two poor, barely functioning agricultural workers. George is taking care of Lenny, although the reasons for his commitment aren't totally clear. Lenny is physically extremely strong but not all there in the head. George conforms more to a person of normal intelligence, but has tremendous coping challenges. In fact, the pair abruptly left an earlier job just before Lenny was arrested. They're currently on the run.
I don't think any reader could ever exactly fall in love with these two broken men. But Steinbeck presents them as fully human if not very smart. Lenny and George have dreams of saving their money so they can have a "stake" of their own. Together they want to purchase a ranch, raise rabbits, and eek out a future. Lenny, for one, is incapable of imagining a future where George isn't in his life as his caregiver.
It's almost as if "angry John" is daring us to fall in love with these two deplorable, downtrodden clay fragments. Yet their humanity, dreams, and devotion to one another, especially George's (because he's closer to being "normal" in intelligence) is strangely attractive. I ask, "What does George know about Lenny that we're missing?" Ultimately, I believe we must succumb to the humanity John Steinbeck invests in both characters.
How does Steinbeck turn the tale, and upend the story, so Lenny and George are ripped apart? He introduces a black stable hand by the name of Crooks. Because there are no other African-Americans in that part of California at that time (that Crooks knows of at least), segregation forces Crooks to live alone. Because he is lonely, and envious of George and Lenny's togetherness, and because George has gone off for a few hours to be with other ranch hands, he asks Lenny to imagine the rest of his life alone, without George. This terrorizes Lenny. He poses the question to Lenny that breaks Lenny's spirit: "But what if George didn't come back?" George does return, but Lenny's faith in George and himself is shaken. His psychic universe crumbles. That sends Lenny into a tailspin of despair that leads directly to him having a conversation with the wife of another ranch hand, named Candy, and to a misunderstanding between them that leads directly to George using his tremendous physical strength to inadvertently break Candy's neck. In the end, in a crude form of justice, George assassinates Lenny with a single bullet to his head while Lenny fantasizes about the rabbit ranch he and George will never have because Lenny knows he "did something very bad."
I read Of Mice & Men for the first time when I was in seventh grade. From the first moment I began reading it, from the very first page, I knew that if this author could cause me to care about Lenny and George, these two lost, misbegotten souls and what happens to them, I wanted to be a writer. (I didn't know at the time that an appetite for breaking hearts was an essential part of the job description.) What touched my heart was how radically different these two men were from one another. The miracle for me was that despite all their differences, Lenny and George wanted to be together in order to live out their "rabbit ranch" dreams.
They reminded me of people I knew as a young man who were together in life yet radically different. Since that day (without knowing it at the time) I've been on this path. To write about both the toll and the gift that depression, trauma, fear, distraction, dreams, desire, and mental disability have on the human spirit and its innate desire to fight, to vanquish, to overcome in heroic terms. Now, finally, my novel Charging the Jaguar is nearing its final form.
