User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I think I have a crush on John Steinbeck. But even if I met him somewhere -- a cocktail party, a barbeque, even my own bookstore -- I don't think I'd talk to him. Maybe make eye contact in a brave and silent way. Sometimes I get the feeling that he is friendly and easy-going, compassionate and kind, and really interested in people in general and persons in particular ... but I know that he is deeply brilliant, and I would say something ridiculous that I would turn over and over in my head (mentally, to myself) for years. Like I did with A.M. Homes, and she's nowhere near as brilliant, and gives off nary an aroma of friendliness.
When I finished this book the other day, I went through my favorite ritual of writing my name and the month and year on the first page of the book, and went to shelve it alphabetically among its fictional brothers. While I was there, I pulled out the other Steinbeck novels to find out when I first read them; most of them are dated 1993. I had forgotten that I owe my discovery of Steinbeck to my friend Erica, who read East of Eden in 8th grade, when I was still churning through Nancy Drew, Mary Higgins Clark and V.C. Andrews. I was inspired and intimidated by Erica's reading lists ... she was reading Kerouac and Ginsberg when she was 13. Maybe before, with her parents. Who knows? I wasn't ready to tackle East of Eden yet, but I picked up a copy of Of Mice & Men/Cannery Row ... and then The Wayward Bus, and Burning Bright, and Sweet Thursday ... and loved them all. But it wasn't until this year that I picked up the big ones -- Grapes of Wrath, good God! And The Winter of Our Discontent ... here's my favorite sentence, from the beginning of Chapter 15:
"It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever."
Yay. Today, fifteen years after the seed was planted, I begin East of Eden.
Rating: really liked it
Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent was first published in 1961 and was his last novel.
It was also the latest book published prior to his winning the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. Interestingly, when asked if he felt that he deserved the award, this “giant of American letters” said: “Frankly, no.” Further, recent archives revealed that Steinbeck was a “compromise choice” for the award amidst a group described as “a bad lot”. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961 showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway." – Wikipedia.
I read several of his works in HS, many moons ago, and last year returned to his canon with his short, brilliant work The Moon Is Down. Steinbeck is to me, the quintessential twentieth century American writer. Hemingway and Faulkner were bridges to an older time, almost lost in mythic dreams of the past. Steinbeck is forward looking, one who chronicles our struggles, reveals our sins and comments upon the path we are on now.
It is in this last endeavor where The Winter of Our Discontent fits. Steinbeck tells the tale of Ethan Allen Hawley, a tragic and lost son of old New England wealth, his connections to the Pilgrim / Pirate heroes of his old family all but lost after the money is gone, but the old house and the family name remain. The reader finds Ethan working as a grocery clerk, in a town his family once all but owned, and working for an Italian immigrant.
In this setting, Steinbeck goes on to describe a modern American morality play. From the town manager, to the judges, to the banker, and all the way to the fortune telling divorcee the town is corrupt and self-serving, but retaining the outward mask and appearance of civility and propriety. Ethan’s dilemma, in the post World War II era, is one that still resonates today, but in amplified and exponential terms.
Now, I’ll go out on a limb and compare Steinbeck’s New Baytown to two unlikely later artists. I have noticed, especially in Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist that his descriptions of later 50s northern California was Steinbeckesque. I’m not sure that Steinbeck ever heard of Philip K. Dick, much less ever read his work, but a fan of Steinbeck’s writing may be pleasantly surprised to visit PKD’s short list of non science fiction works.
Also, and this likeness is more obscure – Peter Benchley’s Jaws is the literary descendant of Steinbeck’s east coast morality play. True, Steinbeck does not illustrate the killing rampage of a prehistoric predator on a summer hamlet – or does he? Steinbeck’s monster is, like Benchley’s (and more obscurely Melville’s) really the elitist façade of correctness amidst a society being consumed from within.
Rating: really liked it
John Steinbeck's last novel and it shows when an author pontificates his views to the readers he becomes not a writer anymore but a preacher. Disappointed in life Steinbeck tries to convey his dark feelings to the rest of the world even if they aren't too interested...there are many others, nevertheless a great novel which few scribblers could match. Ethan Allen Hawley (named after famous Revolutionary War hero) has a comfortable but ordinary existence a loving , loyal , pretty wife Mary two troublesome teenagers Allen and Ellen yet quite normal. His problem the family background, coming from an old aristocratic clan and Ethan just a grocery clerk, the store owned by an Italian immigrant the strict, secretive Marullo. All the Long Island town of New Baytown reiterates his background and he should take a prominent position in the city, worst his wife is tired of being poor and puts substantial pressure on Ethan. Only by devious means can the honest man achieve this success, he has too often seen it happen in the corrupt settlement. Danny Taylor his boyhood best friend now the town drunk , has valuable land where an airport would fit there very nicely. Can he trick the poor pathetic man by stealing it? He is deeply wounded by the decline of Danny so much promise ending up in misery and despair, unable to help the troubled inebriate. His boss maybe isn't legally in America...easily rectified by a phone call. Nothing really bad everyone else does these trivial things...right? The sticky problem is Ethan has a conscious, he knows good from evil, the World War 2 veteran doesn't lack courage in combat however civilians must behave differently no license to kill here . Margie Young -Hunt is very fetching his wife Mary's best friend, searching for a mate had already two before, a tasty morsel if he can cross the forbidden line she seems willing . Mr. Baker the unethical, greedy president of the bank and only one in town wants Danny Taylor's land an airport would be good business, everyone could benefit handsomely especially Mr. Baker. Ethan needs to make choices...still how will the man live with himself if wrong, all people are in the same boat floating or sinking those who are good navigators and manage well will reach the magical shore the others ... descend to the murky bottom.
Rating: really liked it
Rating: 6* of five
The Publisher Says: Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.
Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty that today ranks it alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This edition features an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.
My Review: This is a wonderful short novel by a master of his craft at the peak of his form. It is also his last novel.
Some people at the time it was published felt it was a wrong turning for Steinbeck (
The Grapes of Wrath,
Tortilla Flat) to abandon both the west coast that had made him famous and brought his considerable social conscience to the world's attention for an east coast grifter's POV.
The Winter of Our Discontent is a story that has nothing but shades of gray. Everyone in it is shady somehow. That is, I think, what verschmeckled the reviewers and made the public angry. Up until then, there were clear-cut Good Guys and Bad Guys in every Steinbeck tale. Here...no, no one qualifies as all good or all bad.
The POV is of Ethan, a man who is the degenerate scion of a venerable family. He is married with teenaged kids, and he will do anything to support his family. Including, to their horror, work for an Italian grocer as his clerk. The nerve of the man, a son of the founder of his town, working for someone who *should* be his gardener, according to his friends and his kids.
Well, he thinks, how can I help it, we all gotta eat. So he hatches a plot that will restore the family "honor" by swindling a friend. He goes through with it. He gets what he wants. And, frankly, so does the "swindled" friend, an alcoholic prowling for his next few thousand drinks.
This isn't really Steinbecky stuff, it's too hard to pin down from a moral standpoint. On the other hand, it's superbly told, and it's amazingly well crafted, and it's undoubtedly the best thing Steinbeck wrote after 1950. Reviews were harsh, sales were poor, and Steinbeck lost heart for fiction after that. He published two travel books before his death in 1968, a mere 30 years after "The Grapes of Wrath" burst on the scene. Imagine the wonders he could have produced had he lived to an Updikey 80-plus.
What a wonderful read, and so overlooked...please don't overlook it any longer!
Rating: really liked it
“And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!”
Matthew 27:29A man will rise… A man will fall…
The Winter of Our Discontent is about guilty conscience.
The Winter of Our Discontent is about the nature of fortune and misfortune.
Now I was on the edge of the minefield. My heart hardened against my selfless benefactor. I felt it harden and grow wary and dangerous. And with its direction came the feeling of combat, and the laws of controlled savagery, and the first law is: Let even your defense have the appearance of attack.
Dishonesty is a foundation of prosperity… And honesty leads to discontent.
Rating: really liked it
The brilliance of John Steinbeck intimidates me. I spend a great deal of my time while reading his books nodding my head in agreement and gasping in awe at how he tackles the profound and the everyday with the same amount of elan.
First off, I enjoyed this story. I cared about Ethan Allen Hawley, and not just his person but his soul. I wanted him to emerge unscathed even though I knew he could not, because no one can compromise his own morality and remain unsoiled. I cried for what I knew was his major loss and yet I ended still hoping he could find some way to live with what he had done without resorting to lying to himself, which would only deepen the corruption.
This is the world he lives in, and I dare say it is the world we live in as well:
The Town Manager sold equipment to the township, and the judges fixed traffic tickets as they had for so long that they did not remember it as illegal practice--at least the books said it was. Being normal men, they surely did not consider it immoral. All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.How much immorality is too much? Do the ends justify the means? Is your sin less egregious if you are sinning against a sinner? And, to quote Mark 8:36, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
There is a reason John Steinbeck is considered one of the great American authors. It has something to do with his ability to tell a fascinating tale and still pack so many unobtrusive, salient issues into its telling.
Just one more quote, because who wouldn't appreciate this kind of imagery:
"The young boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger's Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing." Digest that.
Rating: really liked it
‘
Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.’
Every year in late winter, when profoundly discontent with the snow that keeps falling, I find myself thinking of this book, the final novel of the great American novelist John Steinbeck.
The Winter of our Discontent, the title from Shakespeare’s Richard III, is a moral allegory with Steinbeck questioning if personal ethics are valued on the grand scale of society, and if the American dream with its offer of prosperity and property becomes a gateway drug for abandoning your ethics in the name of ever more revenue and riches. This is the story of Ethan Allen Hawley, an everyman with a family name known to the locals, as well as a Revolutionary War namesake, Ethan Allen, to connect readers minds to ideas of American legacy. His father’s fortune gone, Ethan is mostly content providing for his family working for the local grocer, something that locals remind him he should feel ashamed of.
Winter of our Disconent faces everyman Ethan with a series of temptations to rise to wealth and power and Steinbeck shows how moral good is increasingly shucked off for success.
‘
Where money is concerned, the ordinary rules of conduct take a holiday.’
As someone that spent much of my 20s told working retail was something to be ashamed of, the opening of this book connects pretty well. There is also the racism element going on here as his boss, Marullo, is Italian and Steinbeck toys with the disconcerting notion of how immigrants are seen as lesser than and to be an “american” working for one is somehow shameful. Steinbeck brings criticism after criticism of the idea of polite melting pot society. Faced with multiple avenues towards financial stability, such as a bank robbing plot and investment scheme, we see Ethan having a moral meltdown inside and Steinbeck does well to emphasize his Puritan heritage to comment upon the maelstrom of morality he is grappling with. To take action would be to reclaim the honor of his family name, to provide for his kids who are nearing college age, and to have the life he was promised basically for being a white male american with a family name.
Ethan muses on the questions of power and morality saying ‘
in business and in politics, a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind—but he must get there first.’ However, to get there first has a person sacrificed too much? His quest for power begins on Easter Sunday, a clever death and rebirth symbolism added in, and as the novel progresses we watch Ethan fall from his moral pedestal as he swindles, steals and scams his way up. Most notably is the betrayal of his best friend, Danny, the town drunk. He gives Danny money to clean up his life in exchange for his property deeds. He knows full well Danny won’t get clean and in the aftermath Ethan is faced with what he has done, what he has become, and what he has sacrificed morally to get there. No King of the Mountain but a man responsible for death.
‘
I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.’
Ending on the 4th of July is a curious choice, one meant to represent a sort of rebirth.With a near-suicide avoided through his daughter, Ethan hopefully has a new commitment to morality, though we see his son representing the idea that this American amorality is passing onto another generation. While not my favorite Steinbeck, this is one I think about more than others as the years have gone by. It is a dark little allegory and shows Steinbeck’s dissatisfaction with American society, one with much less charm than his younger novels. There is a distinct disillusionment at play, though Steinbeck leaves the ending a bit open in order for possible hope. However, it is certain that in the end we learn that ‘
intention, good or bad, is not enough,’ and an affirmation that personal ethics should, and do, matter.
3.75/5
Rating: really liked it
The Winter of Our Discontent is the grand finale of John Steinbeck's fictitious creations. Deriving the title from William Shakespeare's
Richard III opening lines
"Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York", the story is somewhat a psychological analysis into a man's moral dilemma of doing what is right and doing whatever it takes for him to become successful.
As Gloucester in
Richard III, Ethan Allen Hawley in Steinbeck's novel hopes for better times, as he has reached the height of his discontent. Coming from once a wealthy and influential family, the reduced circumstances to which he has fallen, plodding through his life as a mere grocery clerk is quite displeasing to him. The Hawleys once carried their head high, and now, though he is still respected for his ancestry and lineage, he doesn't know how long the water will hold. He is sure it won't pass to the next generation, unless he, Ethan Hawley, does something about it. He no longer can avoid the growing restlessness in his family, living in reduced conditions. But what can he possibly do? If he treads on a high moral path, nothing. But avenues may open to him if he wouldn't mind deviating lawfully from such high grounds. What ground should he tread on? Success or righteous? Here is then the dilemma for Ethan. And Steinbeck takes us through his quandary with his powerful prose.
This final novel by Steinbeck is quite different from his early works, both in style and theme. The Steinbeck who wrote this wasn't the same Steinbeck who was influenced by his native Salinas Valley. Here he has moved from his comfort zone and adjusted himself to a geographical and cultural change. He had also to adjust to the changing times, the need to address the prevailing issues in American society. There is a mature growth in his writing here. It is rich, deep and, demanding. Steinbeck plays well with his pen. He paints a vivid picture of his story which strongly connects the readers to the characters and settings. His deep but subtle penetration into the mind of the protagonist shows the inner struggle of a man who chooses success above morality. I've never felt Steinbeck to be a demanding writer. But he has presented the story in such a subtle manner that you need the focus of all your faculties to fully appreciate it.
I read that the reception of this novel was mixed and that there were some severe criticisms made against it which silenced Steinbeck's creative fiction. But from the perspective of a devoted fan, this is one of Steinbeck's best.
Rating: really liked it
I was forwarded a blog post recently (written by someone much sharper than me) that asked where our contemporary John Steinbecks have gone. The masterful fiction dedicated to the minimum wage worker, the family displaced by the Great Recession living out of a motel room, or anyone living from paycheck to paycheck seems largely extinct from the bestseller lists.
Hard luck stories about average American families fill newspapers, while in fiction, it seems like world building, not world reporting, are what get traffic. Steinbeck didn't have to worry about launching his author platform or getting retweeted in 1961 when his nineteenth novel was published. His storytelling, his vibrant and passionate depictions of the American worker, and his wisdom, are needed now more than ever.
The Winter of Our Discontent takes place between Good Friday and the Fourth of July, 1960 (Steinbeck apparently wrote the first draft during that same stretch of time). Rather than the Salinas Valley, the story takes place in the fictional hamlet of New Baytown, in northern Maine. The novel is narrated by Ethan Allen Hawley, a grocery clerk whose ancestors made their fortune as privateers (a discreet way of saying "pirates") on the seas.
The empire built by the Hawleys was squandered by Ethan's father through bad investments, while Ethan returned from war to briefly own and operate a grocery store that couldn't stay open. Now a mere employee in a store run by a Sicilian immigrant named Marullo. Ethan's boss regards him with equal parts pride and pity, grateful at the straight line that Ethan walks (never cheating or stealing) while also trying to advise the "kid" on how to make a dollar and a cent in this country. The key to the latter seems to come back to cheating or stealing.
Well-liked in spite of the acidic wit he dispenses around his wife Mary and adolescent children Ellen and Allen, Ethan's fortunes begin to change when his wife's friend, a gold digging floozy with a flair for fortune telling named Margie Young-Hunt, forecasts that Ethan is destined to become one of the most important men in town. The news is met with elation by Ethan's family, tired of being poor. Ethan opts to play the game for a while, to prove how easy it is to become a financial success and how little it changes things once you become one.
Ethan ends up being right on one count, wrong on the other.
A series of seemingly unrelated events fall into place around Ethan, each expertly crafted by Steinbeck. There's Ethan's childhood friend Danny Taylor, a Naval Academy washout whose disappointment to his family transformed him into the town drunk, albeit, a drunk who owns the most valuable real estate around. There's bank teller Joey Brophy, a cad who explains to Ethan how he'd rob a bank if he wanted to get away with it. There's Mr. Baker, a banker dogging Ethan to invest money left to Mary by her brother. Ethan learns of big changes coming to New Baytown and by virtue of his family name, seems poised to benefit.
Ethan doesn't feel sorry for himself or blame anyone for his mistakes as much as he's resigned to watch life from the sidelines now, sick of the hypocrisy his wife and his quiz show obsessed son seem eager to engage in. Ethan isn't the most likable narrator, but I could identify with him. I liked the way that Steinbeck balanced the Way It Used To Be (Ethan holds conversations with both his late grandfather Cap'n, the last mariner in the Hawley line, and his late Aunt Deborah, who taught her nephew how to use his mind and his conscience) with the way things seem to be headed.
In addition to the central character, I had some misgivings about the ending, but I take this as a virtue of the author for investing me in characters I care about. Margie Young-Hunt is a terrific character, a sexually liberated sorceress of a sort who doesn't feel sorry for herself either, and like Ethan, can't seem to resist making waves in the pond. Steinbeck's dialogue is so good and in this novel, we again glimpse what seem like real adults working over what seem like insurmountable economic or social problems at the kitchen table. Steinbeck's gift is making something so mundane so riveting on the page.
Rating: really liked it
I fell in love with Ethan Allen Hawley upon first meeting him. What a character! He is the town's nice guy, comedian and moral center. But he works as a grocer for a store that used to belong to him. He feels that his family was cheated out of it's riches (by someone burning their ship.) As events proceed and he is tempted over and over again to make more money the idea begins to sound better and better to him and slowly his moral compass turns. I still rooted for him though I was increasingly shocked by his behavior and worried for him. He begins to act like everyone else, going along with the others "who all do it," i.e cheat and sometimes hurt others in doing so. This is Steinbeck's main criticism of our culture, the idea that one has to cheat in order to get anywhere, whether it's plagiarism, (Ethan's son for an essay contest), or giving money to the town drunk (a friend ) knowing you (Ethan) will inherit his priceless land as soon as he drinks himself to death.
The ending was brilliantly ironic. Ethan cannot live with himself and what he has done so he attempts to commit suicide by drowning. He curtails this suicide in progress when he finds the talisman in his pocket. He doesn't want to drown himself and take the talisman with him. He wants someone else to have good luck from it; as if the actions which lead to his attempted "suicide" were examples of good luck!
Rating: really liked it
I'm really at a loss as what to say about this incredible novel except that it is American storytelling at its best.
Rating: really liked it
There is a certain emotion in Steinbeck I have not found in other authors. Faulkner comes close, Hemingway a bit further off, perhaps Woolf is on a parallel path. Steinbeck shows us something into ourselves, he states in the book that we all have our own light, we are not a bonfire. We only understand others to the point that we assume they are akin to ourselves. Steinbeck, like Woolf in the Waves, shows us that we are all connected, and that we can find a path in this world through this novel.
This novel has been criticized by others for being lacking in the character development and depth of his other novels like East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath. I agree. It's not a long novel. It only develops one character(narrator) to the full extent and shows us the world around him. But that's the point. He states that we can only know ourselves, and we might not even know that. People look to this book to find a copy of what he has already done, but he changes in this book. He puts us finally inside the head of one of the characters instead of Steinbeck telling us the story. He is giving us, in a sense, a parting gift. The reason people do not like this book is because they want another East of Eden, but this is just as good, if not better.
I do not often read novels that allow me to think about my own self this much. I don't think this would be my first recommendation for a Steinbeck novel, I think one needs to understand his changes from Grapes, Eden, etc. to appreciate this more, but even still, this is my new favorite of his.
Rating: really liked it
East of Eden was 600 some-odd pages and I didn't want it to end. This didn't reach 300 and it could not end soon enough. There was just nothing good about this; I can’t believe this is a Steinbeck work. Moreover, not the work of a budding author still perfecting his craft, but an author who was in the winter of his profession, having already penned
Of Mice and Men,
Grapes of Wrath,
East of Eden and countless other works.
The story is about Ethan Hawley, a man of noble ancestry reduced to a grocery clerk, and his struggle to answer the questions, “What are morals? Are they simply words?” (186). (view spoiler)
[ “Strength and success—they are above morality, above criticism” (187). (hide spoiler)] In the course of his thinking, he ponders over and confounds bank robbery and plagiarism, bribery and business, adultery and cheating on a game show. None of it is interesting. None of it is deep. None of it provokes the reader to any of the same moralizing.
Like the theme, the characters never come across as anything more than words on a page. Ethan is neither likeable nor unlikeable. He’s neither a good guy nor a bad guy. He’s got some qualities that are supposed to be endearing yet does some questionable things. That should make him all the more human, no? For some reason, no. He just isn’t written well. And the supporting cast are all stock characters: the corrupt banker, the town floozy, the lazy cop, the ungrateful teenage kids, the town drunk, the simple wife. The characters are so static that even the narrative descriptions of them appear verbatim fifty pages apart. Their characterization through dialogue is no better. For example:
-They say things like “Guess I’m a peeping Tom at heart…Maybe because I’m a Nosy Parker” (165). Two trite, cornball clichés on one page.
-Then there’s this unforgettable homage to friendship. “Danny and I were friends as all boys must have friends” (91).
-Then there’s this one, which totally baffles me. “She lounged away, a baby-fatted volupt. Girls kill me. They turn out to be girls” (149).
The figurative language certainly doesn’t do anything to beautify the prose. For example:
-“Her hands were like living things as they shuffled and cut” (83). Not sure about your hands, but my hands are living things.
-"It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever" (219). Can we throw any more random shit at the end of that sentence? Maybe “as different as dogs are from a string of random shit”?
Since I find it more unbearable to not finish an unbearable book than I do to unbearably keep reading the unbearable book, I had to find some way to enjoy the experience. Here’s the game I came up with, maybe you can play it the next time you’re reading an unbearable book. Find lines to take completely out of context and imagine the way the story would be different if they were the first lines of the book. For example:
-If this were a crime/horror story: "As a child I hunted and killed small creatures with energy and joy" (115).
-If this were erotica: "My sleeping daughter had the magic mound in her hand, caressing it with her fingers, petting it as though it were alive. She pressed it against her unformed breast, placed it on her cheek below her ear, nuzzled it like a suckling puppy, and she hummed a low song like a moan of pleasure and longing" (127).
I’ll still try to end in typical fashion…
A Decent Line:"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose they are like himself" (44).
Rating: really liked it
When I started reading this, the last novel written by John Steinbeck, I initially thought that I wasn’t going to like it. The prose was as fine as I expected it to be, but it seemed such a small story, compared to powerful epics like The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. However, the story grew on me as I read and the ending packed a punch.
Mostly in the form of a first person narrative, the novel is about Ethan Hawley, a likeable man in his late thirties, married to a woman he loves and the father of two teenagers. Ethan comes from an old and formerly wealthy family in the fictional seaside town in which he lives. However, his father lost the family fortune and Ethan now works as clerk in a grocery store; a grocery store his family used to own. As well educated and intelligent as he is, Ethan has done nothing to reverse the family's precarious financial position. Until now, that is, when a number of circumstances conspire to make Ethan re-think his scrupulous honesty and integrity.
At its heart, the novel is a critique of what Steinbeck considered to be the decline in morality in American society in the 1950s and 1960s, something he also addressed in Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Steinbeck wasn’t concerned with sexual morality, but with hypocrisy and corruption in government and in society generally. While the message is clear – and it’s a message just as relevant today as it was in the early 1960s - the novel isn’t a simple morality play. Ethan is portrayed as a good man. As he acts against his innate sense of honour and integrity, he remains likeable. In going to the dark side, even temporarily, he acts against his instincts and in many ways the novel poses more questions than it gives answers about greed, dishonesty, corruption and betrayal.
Anyone reading this novel who expects another
Grapes of Wrath or
East of Eden is bound to be disappointed. This is a small, intimate novel and it has its flaws. But it's a powerful work in its own quiet way.
Rating: really liked it
“Everybody steals. Everybody does it.”
The title of this novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, comes from the first two lines of William Shakespeare's Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun [or son] of York"; the book focuses on one dark period in the life of one (American) man and his family in a small Long Island town in the late fifties. The Winter of Our Discontent is a moral allegory colored by righteous rage about capitalism and what seems like what is the tendency in the love of money to corrupt those who fall in love with it.
John Steinbeck, who was once a member of the American Communist party before it became synonymous somehow with some kind of fascistic Evil, was always writing about social and economic inequities--in the Grapes of Wrath, in Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, and many others-- sometimes sentimentalizing but always championing his down and out characters as victims of an economic system that favors the rich. Steinbeck died in 1968; Winter (1961), his last novel, the acclaim for which catapulted him to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, casts its light on a Long Island family, particularly the father of the family, Ethan Allen Hawley.
Hawley is in his late thirties, married, with two teenaged kids, and who, in spite of his family’s former aristocratic background, and in spite of his having graduated from Harvard, is clerking for a Sicilian-American named Marullo in the grocery store his father lost. Ethan’s family is sick of their being poor. They don’t own a car, or a tv. Ethan faces some temptations as he turns his attention to various ways to remedy his situation, including criminal temptations involving money, and then some related sexual temptations (the cover of this edition posits the story as a steamy triangle, which is misleading, though there are elements of that here). But everyone wants to know in this little town: Why is the seemingly happy Ethan not “successful”?! (That’s at issue here, the American definition of success as having more money). How can he be happy and not rich? Shouldn't he be ashamed his is mere grocery clerk?
“There is no such thing as just enough money. Only two measures: No Money and Not Enough Money.”
“To most of the world success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Vichy collaborated for the good of France, and whatever else Stalin was, he was strong. Strength and success—they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.”
“Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.”
Ethan’s banker friend Joey Morphy says, “your only entrance is money.” He encourages him to find ways to make more money, get out of the clerk position and do better for his family.
Steinbeck stated that he wrote the novel to address the moral degeneration of American culture during the 1950s and 1960s, and this is fair, and relevant as well to today, though some of it is too morally on the nose for me: Ethan’s wife and two teens all suddenly complain within the same twenty-four hours to him about his lowly job. His friend, a bank clerk, soon after tells him casually how easy it would be to rob a bank, especially if you had no previous criminal record. Someone reminds him that Marullo, his boss, just might be undocumented. On top of that a local divorcee/femme fatale comes around to try to seduce him, urging him to accept bribes. Then his son enters a nationwide essay contest about Why I Love America, getting awarded honorable mention--and he gets to appear on television!!--though this gets complicated. So it’s a moral allegory, where everything piles up in kind of didactic ways to bring Ethan to. . . some questionable actions.
Ethan Allen--that name, a reference to a historical figure well known through American history books as a figure from the Revolutionary period, as an activist in that war--seems nothing like Ethan Allen Hawley, who is seen by his family and most friends as passive, not an activist, until he finally does take (problematic) action in a few ways; for instance, Ethan’s best friend from high school is Danny Taylor, the town drunk, who has the deed to some land that some go-getter businessmen in the town want to develop into an airport to increase commerce and tourism (and profits). Ethan wants to help Danny get into therapy for his alcoholism, so he gives him some money, though both he and Danny know it is a long shot that he will actually get healed with this money, and Danny in exchange gives him the deed to his land. Money. Power.
The book, as moral allegory, moves through a series of aphorisms:
“Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over. . . ”
Some of them are a little bitter from the now discontented Ethan:
“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.”
And Danny counters the notion that having a bit more money would be kinda “nice” to have:
“Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.”
I am not a particular fan of novels as moral allegories, but I have to admit this is a good one, and in the almost predictably dramatic events--as in Greek tragedy--I was nevertheless moved, particuarly the very end that involves a family talisman his daughter has slipped into his pocket. I like Steinbeck’s deft use of shifting points of view; I like his clever Ethan, I can relate to him, as I suspect many can, as Steinbeck intended. I didn’t love this book in the same way as I did Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men or Cannery Row, but I’d still be willing to put it in the top group of his work, I think. It reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury, who also wrote with myth and occasional sentimentality and American morality in mind. When Steinbeck died he left an unfinished manuscript I once read, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, which I thought was part of what he had in mind in Winter with its social and moral criticism. What is goodness? What is true heroism?
Steinbeck's Nobel Prize speech:
https://www.goodreads.com/videos/5379...
