Howdy folks (and welcome new subscribers!) Each Tuesday, Kate and I recommend a book we’re reading. Kate is reading contemporary literature. I’m reading the classics.
This week, my letter to Kate is from sweltering Austin, Texas.
Dear Kate,
I bought a copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men at Half Price Books for $3.48 this weekend. With one smell of the paperback’s spine, I was 15 years old again, sitting in Mr. Chalk’s freshman English class at Round Rock High School.
The smell is lovely. The book is not. Of Mice and Men is very sad.
It’s about the devastation of loneliness. What happens when we don’t work to make connections with the people around us?
This theme felt relevant freshman year. “How will I make friends?” “Does anyone really know who I am?”
It feels extremely relevant today. “Do I have any friends left?” “Who the hell am I?”
I’m sure you remember the plot: Lennie Small and George Milton arrive at a Depression-era California ranch holding government-sponsored work cards, set to start jobs as field hands. Lennie is tenderhearted and developmentally disabled. George is Lennie’s short-tempered protector. In a terrible accident, Lennie kills a woman named Mae. Mae is the wife of the ranch owner’s petulant son, Curley.
Lennie flees into the woods. Curley rounds up a group of men to chase, capture, and kill Lennie. George finds Lennie first. Rather than wait to see what gruesome fate Curley might inflict on Lennie, George kills Lennie himself.
What causes all this hurt?
Loneliness.
Curley is lonely. The friendship between George and Lennie immediately ignites his suspicion and mistrust. Here’s Curley’s reaction when George helps Lennie answer a question about their work status:
Curley lashed his body around. “By Christ, he’s got to talk when he’s spoke to. What the hell are you gettin’ into it for?”
“We travel together,” said George coldly.
“Oh, so it’s that way.”George was tense, and motionless. “Yeah, it’s that way.”
Curley’s wife Mae is lonely. She pesters the men on the ranch, seeking any attention she can find.
“Sure, I gotta husban’. You all seen him. Swell guy ain’t he? Spends all his time sayin’ what he’s gonna do to guys he don’t like, and he don’t like nobody. Think I’m gonna stay in that two-by-four house and listen to how Curley’s gonna lead with his left twict, and then bring in the ol’ right cross?”
Crooks, the Black stablehand, is lonely. The ranch hands do not visit his bunks. They do not invite him for card games. They do not invite him to play horseshoes. Crooks explains his loneliness to Lennie when, innocent of the deep racism at work, Lennie wanders into Crooks’s bunk:
“S’pose you didn’t have nobody. S’pose you couldn’t go into the bunk house and play rummy ‘cause you was black. How’d you like that? S’pose you had to sit out here and read books. Sure you could play horseshoes until it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody—to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”
“I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”
The ranch hands are lonely. They scrounge for work where they can find it.
“Hardly never seen two guys travel together. You know how the hands are, they just come in and get their bunk and work a month, and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody.”
George and Lennie’s friendship—by virtue of its scarcity—sets off a conflict that results in two deaths and the threatened lynching of Crooks.
Our America isn’t too different than Steinbeck’s 1930s America. Unemployment is at a record high. Entrenched, agonizing racism perseveres. We look at one another with suspicion, from the corners of our eyes.
It’s worth reading Steinbeck this week. It’s worth asking: What are the consequences of our actions when we refuse to see the humanity in others?
I’ll leave you with this line from Slim, one of the hired hands on the ranch.
“Ain’t many guys travel around together,” he mused. “I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
Other (lighter) things I read this week:
1. Rachel Syme’s reporting on the rise of “The Nap Dress” is very important.
It is a dress that connotes both extreme stress and also the cessation of it. How wonderful it would be, the Nap Dress suggests, to finally be able to rest after all the hand-wringing.
2. I cannot get over how funny (and yet absolutely terrifying) this essay about experiencing the symptoms of coronavirus is. The writing is exceptional. Can’t miss.
“My downstairs neighbour, whose apartment looks like a commercial for meth addiction and who commences playing EDM every night at 9 o’clock, so that my previously relaxing evenings have been transformed into re-enactments of ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, informed my husband out by the dumpsters that there was no need to worry: only people ‘with a very specific genetic profile’ can get it. He is a nurse. He also owns a custom surfboard designed by Elon Musk, so maybe that has something to do with it.”
3. Have you listened to Terry Gross’s interview with Michaela Cole already? (I mentioned Cole’s show I May Destroy You in an earlier letter.) I could listen to Cole tell stories forever.
Stay well,
Ali