{"id":10809,"date":"2025-05-20T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10809"},"modified":"2025-05-19T12:48:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T16:48:50","slug":"mice-1961","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/20\/mice-1961\/","title":{"rendered":"Mice 1961."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mice 1961<\/a><\/em> was one of the three finalists for this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which ended up going to a fourth book, Percival Everett\u2019s James<\/a><\/em>, causing a minor kerfuffle that I didn\u2019t think was warranted, given how amazing James<\/em> is and the awards it had already won. In the interest of completeness, however, I decided to read all three finalists to see if any had a reasonable case. Not only does Mice 1961<\/em> not have any argument that it should have won over James<\/em>, it\u2019s just a badly written, badly constructed book, one that never should have sniffed the final three (four).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mice 1961<\/em> is built around two sisters, Jody and her albino sister nicknamed Mice, who you might have said at the time was a little off or perhaps \u201ctouched,\u201d and today we might speculate was on the spectrum or something of the kind. The sisters are orphaned, their father long out of the picture, their mother recently deceased, and they live on their own in an apartment with the narrator, a peculiar woman named Girtle who was herself an orphan and ran away from some kind of institution. Mice, the younger of the two, is still in high school and is mercilessly taunted and bullied by the other girls because she\u2019s different \u2013 she looks different, of course, and she tends to fixate on small things and ask the same questions repeatedly. The story takes place the night of a big party, to which their whole Miami-area town has been invited, and Jody\u2019s efforts to get Mice to the party so she can socialize while also keeping an eye on her sister.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fundamental problem with Mice 1961<\/em> is that these characters all suck. They\u2019re not interesting, they\u2019re not three-dimensional, and they\u2019re certainly not sympathetic. Mice feels like a parody of an autistic person, and the fact that she\u2019s an albino (Levine never uses the word, but I\u2019m fairly sure that\u2019s the case here) and also somewhat developmentally disabled feels particularly insulting; albinism is a recessive genetic condition unrelated to intelligence. Jody is constantly worried about her sister, but in the way you might worry about a valuable piece of jewelry, not another human; there\u2019s no sense anywhere in the book that Jody cares about Mice, and she does almost nothing to addressing the bullying other than complain to the police officer who (I think) is sweet on Jody and humors her whining. I spent most of the book wondering if any of these characters weren\u2019t really there, especially Girtle, because so much of what they say and do seemed nonsensical, and Girtle often describes things that she couldn\u2019t have seen without becoming part of the scene. It might have been a better book if she were a ghost or spirit or something else unreal, because I couldn\u2019t figure out what her purpose was other than to be a sort of third-party narrator without requiring Levine to use the third person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n