Of Mice and Men

You would think that I'd have been all over this given my enthusiasm for Steinbeck a few years ago, but this was my first real encounter with the book since I was a sophomore in high school, and Andy Bernea and I did a cutting for our Drama 1 class. I was George and he was Lenny, and he got a standing ovation from the class for his performance. I was along for the ride.

The book is so fucking bleak. As Sara said, you know it's going to turn out badly, but it makes Grapes of Wrath seem like a comedy. And there is a lot that seems unrealistic about the story, even though it is considered a story of realism. Mainly, Lenny. Given his behavior around the puppy and the ease with which he crushed Curley's hand and killed Curley's wife, it's hard to imagine that he would have made it as far as his did without being locked up. Sara pegged him as psychotic, especially when he threw the dead puppy around, and it just doesn't seem real that he had not been incarcerated or killed before then. Interesting that Steinbeck says that he worked with Lennie and watched the real "Lennie" kill the ranch foreman with a pitchfork.

Curley and his wife don't seem all that plausible to me, but maybe that's a product of the times that I grew up in. For Curley to go around trying to pick a fight with the ranch hands, or then to insist that he was going to gut-shot Lenny when he found him just doesn't ring true with me. The code of the west comes to the Depression?

Candy and Crooks provide enough pathos throughout the book to keep it depressing. Both of them are in dead ends with their lives with nothing to look forward to after being essentially destroyed by their jobs. Candy seems as simple as Lennie much of the time, and his hopes are of course shattered when Lennie dies. Crooks almost buys into the dream of a house and a farm, but pulls back in refusing to hope for something better.

I find it hard to believe that this has been taught in American lit for so many years. I wouldn't even begin to know how to approach it with kids who have so little background knowledge. Maybe it's a fit with depression era literature, but it seems that there must be better stuff out there. And if I were going to teach a short Steinbeck novel, I'd go for Cannery Row over Mice and Men.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1937

Length: 4 hr

Narrator: Hammer, Mark

Star Island

OK. Hiaasen is a lot of fun--and Star Island is fun--but the last couple of books are running thin. I enjoyed his earlier books--especially Skin Tight, Double Whammy, Stormy Weather, and Skinny Dip--a lot more. There's ust too much name dropping and brand name dropping in Star Island for my tastes. Yes, it is a book about modern notions of fame, stardom, and the paparazzi, and the inherent absurdity of it all, but it does leave me kind of cold.

Two of Hiaasen's previous characters return in Star Island--Skink and Chemo--but outside of Skink's tying a sea urchin onto the balls of the condo developer, or his taking a shit in the washing machine of his former lieutenant governor, he seems out of place. And, Hiaasen keeps reiterating the absurdity of Skink's appearance, almost as if her were padding the book. Chemo comes off a lot less creepy than his previous appearance in Skin Tight, and even achieves a certain amount of compassion in his refusal to kill Bang Abbott, the paparazzo, or Ann DeLusia, the double for Cherry Pye. Ann is really the only sensible character in the book, and it's her story that drives the novel. Cherry Pye is a complete caricature of stardom--think Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton--although it is hard to think caricature with the likes of them on the loose. Cherry's parents and her agent are the real culprits, in a sense, as they lead blood sucking lives leeching on their daughter's stardom. And she has no talent to begin with. Keeping her straight and sober, and cleaning up the messes when she doesn't, forms the major part of the book, and it's all doomed to failure until the end of the book when Ann steps in and forces sobriety on Cherry. Of course, it was hard to keep a straight face when Linday Lohan's father announced that he was opening an addiction facility this past week--he could have stepped straight out of this novel.

So Star Island turned out to be a pretty forgettable book. It started off with some promise, but then it started to lose direction and ended up tying up a lot of loose ends when the rest of the story didn't coalesce. Maybe Hiaasen should write about novelist who can no longer bring their A game to the table with the distractions of living up to their own fame.

Author: Hiaasen, Carl

Date Published: 2010

Length: 11hr 31min

Narrator: Hoye, Stephen