The Red Pony

The Red Pony is the kind of book that I hope every book I pick up will be like. And when a book is one of those books, I am awash in deep gratitude. I even feel a sense of relief. Oh, at last!

Merely four short stories all about the same boy told in just under 100 pages. I can simply write the chapter titles here and instantly be immersed back in each with vivid detail: The Red Pony, The Great Mountains, The Promise, and The Leader of the People. Just four chapters and I wouldn't dare to wish for more. It is perfection where it stands. And that's because it's not about a boy growing up. It's about a boy. Outside of these pages he will grow up and carry these heartbreaks into manhood and perhaps be a quieter, angrier man because of them. show more But here, at this time, in this perfect small book, he is the "little boy Jody."

Steinbeck's writing is the kind of timeless story-telling that feels familiar even the first time your eyes glide across the words, the lines, the page, masked by the beauty of effortless sequence. It's as fluid and clear as water; it's story-water that he's pouring into you. You don't think about the writer, or stop to admire his prose, or even think much about what's going to happen next. You are in that minute in the story. And the next minute. And the next. You are a living conduit for the story to tell its tale again.

I was the boy Jody. I felt when the wind lifted and tussled my hair. I heard the swishing of the dried oat grass as I walked through it. I was restored by the cool water in the green basin and I also feared the dark cypress tree. I skipped even when I knew I should be too old to skip, from pure happiness. I was gleeful to scatter mice with a homemade flail to their deaths for an afternoon's entertainment. And, as Jody, my 10-year old heart was devastated in a hundred different little and big ways. show less

Ugh, Steinbeck, what a dick. I put the book down for weeks (months?) each time he killed a horse. But he's right - life can be horrible; empathy and kindness make it less so.

The included short story, Junius Maltby, punched me in the gut. This is why I love Steinbeck.
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Mrs. Munroe turned helplessly to the teacher. "What's wrong with him, anyway?"

"I think he was embarrassed," said Miss Morgan.

"But why should he be? We were nice to him."

The teacher tried to explain, and became a little angry with them in trying. "I think, you see - why I don't think he ever knew he was poor until a moment ago."

I have a schadenfreude about eighth graders finding this on their reading list and after grinning at the pony in the title on the cover grimacing at the internal calamities of knife birth, equine distemper, forcing buzzards off a corpse and more. Well, the theme is one of encountering painful realities especially through loved animals... I most like the final short story, which feels tacked on as it does not include clueless Jody or a pet in distress. "Junius Maltby" is the story of man so enamored with reading that even worse calamities -- including privation and his dying children -- cannot distract him from a good book. Well, at least it looks like his son turns out alright.

Who captures the disappoint and tragedy of everyday life like Steinbeck? The Red Pony takes place on a farm (and for those of you who have never spent time on a real farm, I can tell you that life is hard and nature is cruel). The boy, Jody, is coming of age and being faced with what it is to be human, to cope with loss, to watch the death of dreams, and to do this in the shadow of a father who tolerates no sentimentality. The last section in this series of tales in Jody's life is the most poignant of all for me, because when the life of hard times is spent, there is not even any room for remembering and softening the edges of the past.

I found each of the stories within the story to be pregnant with meaning. It was so easy to see life show more from the different characters' points of view. Jody, as a boy, trying to sort out what life actually does mean, Billy Buck living within the family but outside it and trying to live up to the image Jody has of him and his reputation for knowing everything, the father who is trying to hold this enterprise together and make sound decisions and who must always put practical matters first, and the mother who provides the base around which the men revolve.

So much depth in so few pages! So often novellas leave me feeling cheated or wanting more because the story feels unfinished. This is not the case here. Steinbeck knows exactly what he wants to say and he knows exactly when he has said it. show less

There is something cathartic about reading Steinbeck. His writing has always impressed me, especially his descriptions of farm life in the west. This book, which is really a collection of short stories about a family, focuses on a little boy named Jody. This is his story, but he is far from in control. And that is the point. This is a coming-of-age for a little boy who is learning that harsher realities of life and death, the there is no permanence to childhood and that bad things do happen. The anxieties he feels and the moments he experiences are beautifully captured and really honed in on what it feels like transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and it doesn't have anything to do with age.

I hated The Red Pony when I had to read it for school when I was a kid. But that was also true of some other books that I later came to love (such as Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter) and I have since enjoyed some (though not many) of Steinbeck's other books (particularly Of Mice and Men and East of Eden), so I decided to give it another chance.

Now I *loathe* it.

My major complaint when I was younger was that the story was disconnected---what happens in one chapter seems to have little or no bearing on the others, or even contradicts them. The eponymous red pony is gone after the first chapter; another pony is born at the end of the third, but makes no appearance in the fourth. It turns out that this is because this isn't really so much a show more novel as a collection of short stories, which were originally published separately though they feature the same characters.

But there is a deeper, thematic, unity to these stories, and that is what I detest about them now. They are all about death. Not just any natural death, either, but particularly horrible deaths. And this is in the context of stories about a young boy on the cusp of manhood; according to Steinbeck, growing up is largely (if not entirely) about learning about death. For Steinbeck, death defines life.

Only the fourth story doesn't contain a gleeful depiction of a disgusting death. It centers on a visit from the boy's grandfather, much to the chagrin of the boy's father, who hates his father-in-law's visits because of the old man's tiresomely repeated stories. This is the basis for what could be an amusing story or even a meaningful one, but it is itself incredibly tedious---though it does almost manage to convey an interesting meaning when the boy's grandfather tells him, "I tell those stories, but they're not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them." But what he goes on to say isn't nearly as profound or interesting as Steinbeck apparently intended it to be, and even if it were it probably wouldn't be enough to redeem the rest of this worthless book. Even Frank Muller's narration of this audio edition couldn't much improve it.

Not that death isn't a part of life...but there is more to life than death. But you wouldn't know it by reading The Red Pony. show less

I was warned in advance that this is not a horse story, and to an extent that's true. It's four stories, in fact, that appear to be sequential and can also be read as one complete story. All take place among the same characters on the same ranch. There's some cringeworthy scenes here that make me glad I was never a ranch hand, or at least not then, but they enable mortality and the facing of death to become a running theme. Steinbeck is sharing the lessons to be learned from such a life without our having to live it. He is - or has since become - like the grandfather in the last story: it is not so important what the content of these stories is than how they make the reader feel. One element gets in the way now that perhaps he didn't show more foresee, the reference to colonialists ousting American natives from their land as a "heroic time".

Different editions of this story come published with a variety of other Steinbeck works. Mine is only accompanied by "Junius Maltby", a short story about a family who puts its happiness ahead of societal mores, until awareness is imposed and the bubble bursts. show less