The Winter of Our Discontent [Paperback]

With over 90% of the grocery stores today being multi-store operations, we see in this book the beginnings of the Madison Avenue economy we live in today, and what has been lost in the process.

At least Hawley struggled against the tide, where today it has become almost chic to lack morals, fool consumers, be the trickster guru, or market a ton of air in attractive colors and graphics.

Steinbeck shows us it should be a struggle, and indeed it will be a difficult one in a cultural setting where rationalizations ("It's only a crime against money - afterall!") eat away at the social requirements of honesty, decency, and respect for your fellow men and women.

At the end, a symbolic clue leads the reader back to a previous chapter and obscure dialogue. Left to ponder what this really means.

For a short novel, the book includes a wealth of characters, many of which I found well described. There is Ethan's wife Mary who is impatient with the family's impoverished lots and eager for Ethan's economic success as well as the couple's two children, Allen, who is writing an essay called "Why I Love America" and the sexually precocious daughter Ellen. We meet the town banker, Mr. Baker, a bank clerk and a friend of Ethan's, Margie Young-Hunt, twice married and the town seductress, and Danny Taylor, Ethan's childhood friend who has thrown away a career of promise and become a drunk.

The book describes the deteriorations of Ethan's life as he gradually loses his integrity and succumbs to temptations to lift his life, and the lives of his family members, from its materially humble state to a state consistent with Ethan's felt family heritage and education and with the desire of his family for material comfort. The story is sad and told in a style mixing irony and ambiguity that requires the reader to reflect and dig into what is happening. The story ends on a highly ambiguous note with Ethan's future left in doubt.

The book describes well the lessening of American standards and values. The book seems to attribute the loss to an increasing passion for commercial and economic success among all people in the United States. Juxtaposed with the economic struggle are pictures of, in steinbeck's view, what America was and what it could struggle to be. I think the images are found in religion (much of the story is, importantly, set around Good Friday and Easter and these holidays figure preminently in the book), and in America's political and cultural heritage. In the old town of
New Baytown, America's history figures prominently with speeches from American statesment such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln tucked (suggestively) in the family attic. The book is set against a backround of New England whaling and reminds the reader inevitably of a culture that produced Melville and a work of the caliber of Moby Dick.

The most convincing scenes of the book for me were those where Ethan ruminates his life in his own mind and compulsively walks the streets of New Baytown at night. I was reminded of Robert Frost, a poet of New England and his poem "Acquainted with the Night" which begins:

"I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light."

Steinbeck captures much of the spirit of this wonderful poem.

The plot of the book seems contrived at is climax and depends too much on coincidence. The characters, and their inward reflections on themselves, the descriptions, the setting, and the theme of the book, mingled between a love for our country and a sense of despair, make the book memorable.

He is not only a Harvard grad, he is impossibly witty, glib, and, all of a sudden, street smart. No such person would have sat still so long, any such person could have made money in 1948-1960 without cutting corners morally to a significant degree, and no such person would be surprised that cutting corners morally in pursuit of wealth would make him feel so bad that he might not be able to live with himself.

Steinbeck wanted to make a statement about the sad state of morals in 1960 America, but immorality was not unique to that time, or our time, or the late '30s (Grapes of Wrath), or the Roman Empire or the Russian Steppes or anyplace or anytime else. Immorality is the oldest story in the book, so if you want to talk about it through characters, there is no reason for doing so other than simply as an excuse to write good characters, but Steinbeck fails to do that. Margie and Joey, friends of Ethan, are also like him: ambitious and impossibly perspicacious and witty, yet somehow stuck in dead-end lives year in and year out in a dead little town. It's a silly, tiresome book, micro-smart but macro dumb dumb dumb.