Steinbeck's supposed to be a great writer, right? One of the best novelists ever. Well, what a sorry bunch of garbage this little effort was.

Now, I'm not one for sentimentality and when I see the word "heartwarming" describing a movie or book I usually do my best to avoid it.

So when I saw the title "The Red Pony" and its byline "The moving and beautiful story of a boy, a sorrel colt and the sun-drenched California earth" I was hesitant but ready to place myself in the hands of a master story-teller, hoping that if the book was sappy and sentimental then at least I would enjoy the wordcraft and benefit that way.

But no. The writing is stilted and at times, awful. Virtually everything the boy Jody (main character) did was done "shyly", whether talking, behaving, or just being, as if his entire character is defined by this vapid adverb. Don't Strunk & White tell us to turf the adverbs? Well, Steinbeck does the opposite and attaches them to random verbs at every turn, and to dialogue tags like "said" and "asked" with annoying frequency, as if the reader cannot infer mood or emphasis from the context of the story.

Oh, and where IS the story? Maybe at 100 pages or so this "novella" was too short to fit any in. The four pretentiously labeled chapters are unconnected and deliver little that is profound or truly interesting. I think there are only six characters and not one is captivating or nuanced or cleverly drawn, except for the farmhand Billy Buck who is marginally so. (Sure, I'm tossing a few adverbs around myself but then I'm not asking people to dole out cash for what I write.)

In a novella you would think every word would be chosen economically and that descriptions would be spare and focused but Steinbeck spends an entire page mellifluously wordpainting every physical detail of Gitano, the old wandering Mexican, who enters the narrative inexplicably and departs equally so. I couldn't care less about this minor character's mustache which was "blue-white against the dark skin, and hovered over his mouth" nor his "bony wrists" that were "gnarled and knotted and hard as peach branches." Steinbeck then goes on to detail the man's fingernails. Next time use the damn words on story, please!

Well, "heartwarming" this book is not, so Steinbeck didn't pander there. But with the title of "The Red Pony" I expected a fully developed tale on said beast, or, if not, then something symbolic and deep pertaining to it. Got neither, and in spades. This is a horrible and heartless journey (though "journey" almost implies "story", sorry) into the semi-psychopathic mind of a boy who, owing to his father's emotional coldness and bouts of verbal cruelty, can almost be excused for sadistically torturing and killing numerous animals after "The Red Pony" dies a gruesome death relatively early in the book.

If you love horses you will not want to go through page after hackneyed page of the pony's suffering until it ends up on some bereft meadow with its eyes gouged out by vultures. Jody comes upon this scene, grabs the offending vulture leader from the corpse of the horse and kills it with his bare hands in a manner described far too disgustingly. This is great literature? Thereafter, this incipient serial killer goes on a rampage against the animal kingdom generally and at that point, if you are still reading, you are thinking "What the hell . . . .?"

But, I did read on past the vulture incident, though, with the slim hope that there was a redeeming literary event down the line. There most certainly wasn't. The father pays $5 to a neighboring rancher to have his stallion sire a foal for Jody to raise. Okay, here's where it turns around, I thought naively. But there is a problem with the mare at the moment of birth and Billy Buck is forced to bash her brains in with a hammer in order to deliver the foal. (Fed-up sigh.) At that point I said eff you, Mr. Steinbeck.

Definitely not for kids nor for most adults. I give it one star because I can't give a zero or minus grade.

Oh, what a catharsis for me! See, I read the book just yesterday and immediately tossed it in the trash after. But this wasn't enough, hence I am here venting my spleen all over. I needed to do this. Thank you.

One last word. If you are a Steinbeck groupie then I am very, very sorry. Not for what I said here but sorry that this so-called classic got published in the first place and that I paid good money for it during a recession. Don't assume that because the author's name is Steinbeck that a given book is wonderful, gripping, brilliant, riveting just because the ivory tower literati, who worship at the man's shrine, say so. If one man's meat is another man's poison then I got a real bad case of gastroenteritis here. But maybe you will read it and pronounce it filet mignon.

Perhaps "Of Mice and Men" is better. The critics like it, don't they?

Do they really assign this in school as much as it appears from the comments I'm reading here? "The Red Pony" is short, and written in a style readily grasped by bright adolescents, but like so much of Steinbeck, it's so dire that it seems a form of abuse shoving it into young minds.

Not that I'm a hater. No, I found "The Red Pony" to be a vivid and bracing account of growing up on a California ranch just a decade or so after the closing of the American frontier. John Steinbeck sets you down in the Salinas Valley so firmly you can hear the water running down the sagebrush line to the mossy tub which young Jody, the boy at the center of things here, drinks from in idle moments of contemplation.

Being there is one thing. Wanting to be there is another. Steinbeck published this in 1933, early in a career devoted to expressing life's harshest truths, and "The Red Pony" serves as a valid calling card that way. Nothing that happens in "The Red Pony" can be said to be pleasant, from the whiffletree hanging from a branch that is used to slaughter pigs to the fate of small creatures little Jody is able to get his hands on when in a foul mood. Steinbeck draws a lot of power from his accounts of the natural world, but in his hands it's always a raw, mean thing.

The story is limited in other ways, too. The novel presents few characters besides Jody. His father is a gruff type, thoughtful enough to buy his son a pony but snorting "I don't like trick horses" when Jody begins to train the animal. Mother is quiet, shortly reminding Jody of his chores but often capable of kindness.

There's only one ranch hand on this ranch, Billy Buck, a thoughtful, hard-working man who seems to do most of Jody's raising and also handles the horses on the ranch, with mixed results. He seems the conduit for Steinbeck's take on life.

At one point in the book, Jody's planning to kill some mice in a haystack. "I'll bet they're fat," he says. "I'll bet they don't know what's going to happen to them today."

"No, nor you either, nor me, nor anyone," Billy answers.

There's also an old wandering paisano and a windy grandfather, who make extended separate cameos in sections that serve as reprieves from the harshest sections of Steinbeck's narrative only in that the focus is thankfully off horses.

Small a cast as that is, Steinbeck doesn't exact weave them together masterfully. Told in four chapters, the book works more as a collection of four short stories, each of which present another of life's hard truths brought home to young Jody. You have to work harder than Steinbeck did in order to connect them. It's a major failing; one expects more cohesiveness in a book this small.

Yet saying this is a bad book simply because it is short or confused or unpleasant is not right. Unlike other Steinbeck books I can name ("The Pearl"), the moments of tragedy have a real lived-in feeling to them, and a sensibility that belies their apparent randomness. Looking at Jody, one sees the development of a mindset that had its expression in the body of Steinbeck's work, a corpus that commands enduring respect.

I just wouldn't force it on a young person. Let them pick it up or not on their own. Otherwise you'll just get a lot more hostile one-star reviews on Amazon.com.

As a piece of literature, for an older reader, 30 years later I can admit it has merit.

The problem is that because it's a "classic", it tends to be on school reading lists. And because the title is "The Red Pony," naturally teachers (or parents, or students themselves) recommend it to readers interested in horses. This happens especially because there are few if any animal books on the standard "great books" lists.

For a student of 16 or 17, this might be fine.

I read it at the age of 9.

For a 9 year old, this story is too graphic, too traumatic, too nasty for its nuance or lessons to be appreciated. It left me angry and in tears, especially horrible as some cruel joke that the only way an animal-oriented book could be on the reading list was to have the pony die a terrible death and then for the boy to have to watch the pony's eyes plucked out and eaten by vultures. As my revenge I absolutely refused to touch another Steinbeck book for 20 years.

Don't let this happen to your kids. Introduce them to Steinbeck via one of his other works, and wait on this one until they are older.

THE RED PONY is a beautiful and simple classic by John Steinbeck, the great American novelist whose heart always goes out to the oppressed, the misfits, and the distressed.

This story is about a young boy, but it provides reading pleasure for adults as well. It is composed of four distinct parts. Part I, "The Gift," is the story of Jody and his horse Gabilan. Jody's father is a harsh man, who has difficulty communicating with the boy. In characteristic Steinbeck fashion, the story is filled with tragedy and suffering.

Part II, "The Great Mountains," relates another episode in the maturation process of Jody. He has an encounter with a old Mexican man passing through his father's farm. Jody is brooding and coming of age. There is an event in this part that takes on special significance for him. The story is rich with symbolism involving nature and animals.

Part III, "The Promise," is a story of the way a farm boy learned a lesson about reproductive biology. Again there is poignant tragedy.

Part IV,"The Leader of the People," is a separate story only loosely connected in plot to the other parts, but well-connected in the character development of Jody.

When I read THE RED PONY, I found myself despising and pitying Jody's father at the same time. The reader sees the father the way Jody sees him. What really happens in the novella is the emotional and moral maturation of a ten-year-od boy.


One of the greatest traits of Steibeck's writing is the way he makes every word carry its way and every turn of the plot count.

While there are other, greater works by Steinbeck, this one combines his disarmingly simple prose style with a number of concepts from his work in the 30s and early 40s. Mainly, the strange and ultimately destructive drive of humans in industrial society (as shown in the 4th story). The rest is a fascinating portrait of a boy's coming-of-age and alienation from his father. maybe people are tired of coming-of-age stories. but that doesn't mean Steinbeck's version isn't well-done.