The Winter of Our Discontent

Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Book
Review: To any of you who are considering reading this book, the following points may be helpful:

* Of all the Steinbeck novels I've read, I consider this one to be his wittiest, funniest and most intelligent. The dialogue is great and the main character (Ethan Allen Hawley) may be my favorite Steinbeck character of all-time.

* This book focuses on thought rather than plot. We are taken on detailed journeys through Ethan Hawley's mind (in fact, some of the chapters of this book are written in the first-person rather than the third-person, such that Hawley speaks to us directly). What we are shown are the motives and means through which a conscientious human being trades a life of good deeds for a life of deception and acquisitiveness, and the result is jarring.

* As indicated above, however, this book is NOT plot-driven. Therefore, some readers may not like it as much as, say, "The Grapes of Wrath" or "In Dubious Battle". Do yourselves a favor and read the first page or two of the book before buying it. If you are drawn into the dialogue on these pages, you'll probably love the book - it represents the general tone of the novel throughout, though toward the end the book gets much darker as Ethan's abandonment of his morals and the consequences thereof are driven home to the reader.

This truly great novel will stick with the reader long after the last page has been turned. Read it - I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: One of the more relevant books for our new millenium
Review: The Winter of Our Discontent showcases John Steinbeck's trademark understanding of human nature in a unique East Coast venue. My reading of this book was particularly well-timed; I was completing my education and job hunting. Ethan made me realize that the quest for money, power, and prestige is dangerous when it involves the sacrificing of one's happiness, morals, and values. This book is all about the danger posed by our society's defining success by monetary achievement. Human nature is funny: it is just when we achieve happiness and stability that we find something else to covet -- the endless cycle that makes so many unhappy when they reach their life's end.

Rating:
Summary: A moral distinction
Review: This book is amazing in a very specific and unusual way. It chronicles the slow slide, not to the depths of immorality that come to mind when we use that term, but merely to one step down on the morality ladder. There is not a mountain of difference between the man on page one and the man who stands on the beach on the final page, contemplating suicide. He has committed no crime, has resisted cheating on his wife, and has tried to save the life of his drug-addicted friend... the tiny difference lies not in the things he hasn't done wrong, but in the things he didn't do quite right. This difference is all the difference in the world. Steinbeck's power is in his portrayal of the nuances that make up personal experience. Where Grapes of Wrath was a powerful epic, the depths of poverty the characters endured enabled us to keep the experience at a distance, since few of us will ever know such poverty. The Winter of Our Discontent allows us no such respite. Each of us experiences temptation on a daily basis, and the risk of moral poverty that we all face and either resist or become accustomed to, is at the heart of this book. The final page is, oddly enough, a mystery, though this fact can easily escape you. All the members of my family read this independently, and only when we discussed it several years later did we find that we each had interpreted the end in different ways. Does he commit suicide or not? We were firmly split, and the wording Steinbeck uses is ambiguous. The answer is in the story that emerges from you as you read the book. Perhaps the most subtly powerful book you will ever read, if you are willing to allow it to affect you.

Rating:
Summary: end of an era
Review: This book reads like a howl of pain from a man who did not like where he saw his country headed. Sadly, no one was listening.

Ethan Allen Hawley is a Harvard educated descendent of New England shipping captains. In years past, his family was one of the most important in town. But now times have changed & after his father lost most of the family fortune & Ethan himself lost the family store, he is reduced to being a grocery clerk in the employ of an immigrant, Mr. Marullo.

Ethan's wife, Mary, and his two children, Ellen and Allen, push him to better the family's lot. Mary, for instance, wants him to invest the $6000 she inherited upon her brother's death.

The town vixen, Margie Young-Hunt, provides a powerful pull to kick over the traces & run a bit wild. She sends a representative from a food wholesaler to Ethan & he is offered a kickback if he'll buy from them.

Meanwhile, Danny Taylor, his childhood friend & now the town drunk, holds a piece of property that developers are desparate to get ahold of for their planned airport. The local banker approaches Ethan for help in getting the property away from Danny.

In short order Ethan is narcing on neighbors, betraying Danny, taking bribes & planning to rob the bank.

The ease with which the morally upright Ethan slips into a life of scheming and crime is not particularly believable. And I'll leave it to others to question the likelihood of a college graduate turned grocery clerk (lawyer/technicians shouldn't throw stones.)

However, Steinbeck had clearly perceived the general decline in morality that was occuring and accelerating as the nation entered the 1960's. As Ethan considers his schemes, he says, "A crime is something someone else commits". Here's his description of the year 1960: it was "a year when secret fears come into the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. The whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as discontent moved to anger and anger tried to find outlet in action, any action so long as it is violent."

Steinbeck manages to paint an extremely bleak portrait of America & where it was headed, but it's hard to argue that he was wrong. He offers only two rays of hope. At one point, Ethan recalls the words of his grandfather, "Only in a single man alone--only in one man alone. There's the only power--one man alone. Can't depend on anything else." This nearly biblical incantation offers the way out of the predicament that Steinbeck has forecast. Each man must take responsibility for his own actions.

Then when Ethan has reached the end of his rope & considers suicide, a simple action by his daughter draws him back from the edge & he determines that he must try to help her, "else another light go out." I found this to be somewhat too little too late, especially as his daughter has already gotten up to no good.

I did find one thing remarkable about the book. Steinbeck may well have been the last of the significant traditional novelists. It is such a pleasure to read a straightforward story that doesn't resort to magical realism or interior monologue or other modernistic artifice. At one point, Ethan says, "A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of predjudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders." Compare this to The Way of All Flesh, where Samuel Butler stated that he didn't care if anyone ever read his books or to James Joyce's completely inaccessible works.

It seems to me that this novel may stand as the demarcation of the end of a moral and a stylistic era.

GRADE: B

Rating:
Summary: An American Classic
Review: The moral decline of the nation is reflected in the inner struggle of Ethan Allen Hawley, resident of New Baytown, a sleepy New England town about to expand its tourist industry. Ethan, who lives in a house built by his forefathers, is a clerk in a store once owned by them. He has not lived up to the family fortune and promise, as a descendant of pilgrims, pirates and whaling captains. It seems as if he has found a sort of contentment, is in love with his wife, loving towards his two kids and spouting sermons to the canned goods in the early morning. "A reflected cathedral light filled the store, a diffused cathedral light like that of Chartres. Ethan paused to admire it, the organ pipes of canned tomatoes, the chapels of mustard and olives, the hundred oval tombs of sardines." He has the Place as well, an escape where he can be alone and take stock. And he needs to take stock, because the pressures of others-- his family, the town banker who is plotting for the overthrow of the local government, and the town fortune-teller and promiscuous divorcee, Mrs. Margie Young-Hunt who has her designs on him as a "back-up plan" of sorts -- they all want him to desire more for himself. They want him to reclaim his family's fortunes, to pursue money and rise in position. Marullo, the owner of the store, tells him how business really works: "'Business is money. Money is not friendly. Kid, maybe you too friendly--too nice. Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.'" Within the same day, Ethan resists a bribe by a traveling salesman to switch his meat vendor and take a kickback, being told that "everyone does it." Even his friend Danny Taylor, who is now the town drunk, holds himself in higher regard than Ethan because of his lowly position as store clerk.

Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, a plan begins to form in Ethan's mind to change his situation and the vague outline of it is slowly revealed to the reader. He wonders if he can have a short moral lapse, set the rules so ingrained in his being aside for a short time for a large, temporary gain. Will he be able to carry out the plan? Will he be able to live with himself afterward?

Steinbeck's characters are interesting and memorable. Joey Morphy, aptly known as the Morph, turns into what he needs to be, often saying things he suspiciously "heard from a friend." Then there is Margie Young-Hunt, who is indeed a hunter. She sets a bit of a trap for Ethan, who never trusted her despite her being close to his wife. He calls her a witch, and by the end of the book, I did wonder if she had cast a spell over him. Ethan's grandfather, Cap'n, has long since passed away, but to him Ethan still loudly recites the rigging of the ships in the harbor. He is also haunted by Aunt Deborah, whose moral fiber runs deeply ingrained in her nephew.

This is a very different Steinbeck than Of Mice and Men or Grapes of Wrath. It is rich in its use of dialogue, with both interior and exterior conversations. This book is superbly written, complex yet a "page-turner" in its suspense. It is clear why it is considered an American classic.

Rating:
Summary: The Temptation of Success
Review: We all know the difference between right and wrong, but the temptation to commit something that is wrong to make things more right is incredibly strong. That is what Steinbeck main character here has to deal with. Every where he turns their is another temptation to do something and many times he almost gives in, but the decent soul always wins out; well almost always. He does commit somethings that maybe weren't the best things to do, but... This is a fine book, well written and everyone should be able to identify with these all to real characters. The setting is a small town in the east, the kind of town that we have seen in movie after movie, but in all these towns, just as in real life, there are things that are not altogether wholesome going on. This couls be set at anytime, anywhere and still be as true to life as it is. This is a book that should be read.

Rating:
Summary: Contentment comes to those who wait...
Review: Ironically, I found myself "contented" with the "Winter of Our Discontent." I wouldn't say "overwhelmed" or "amazed" or "thrilled." I was certainly not "DIScontent," but simply, "content."

On the 1961 dust cover of this little first edition that I found in an antique store, the liner notes recognize that Steinbeck seemed to have lost his touch after publication of a few of his more famous novels. They recommend that this may be his saving grace. I don't particularly agree or disagree.

Ethan Allen Hawley is the descendant of a family of whaling tycoons. Generations later, the family fortune is gone, but remnant notoriety of his family name seems to earn respect in the small, waterfront town where he resides with wife and children in the ancestral home. His dead-end job as a grocery clerk leaves him with feelings of want. However, renewed small town fame and fortune await him if only he can muster the patience.

Steinbeck creates a simple story about a portion of someone's life with his family. Dear reader never seems to know just where this life is headed, but he gets to peek into the interactions of a family with interesting personalities. Hawley has an obnoxious way of bantering with the love of his life, Mary and she seems to enjoy it. I would personally beat him with a silly stick for continuing with such constant and playful dialogue on a daily basis. He even finds himself in a few embarrassing and saucy situations in this small Hamlet where he lives. But still, dear reader relishes the simple life that Steinbeck portrays. There is just enough character and local gossip to keep it from being a mundane life in a small town.

For dear reader who pines for the life of the small burg from whence he hails, I recommend this story. For dear reader who has never known this sort of existence, I recommend it for a glimpse and somewhat informal education of what he may have missed. Nonetheless, enjoy the story. I did!

Rating:
Summary: Steinbeck's last great novel
Review: This is Steinbeck's last great novel; but one of it's highlights is Steinbeck's ability to create characters that are real. You the reader can identify--not necessarily identify with--the characters and care about their actions and their feelings. The prose is clean and compact, like the best of Steinbeck's writing, and is real; he never turns it into an endless torid sea of "clever" wordplay. There is a story to be told, and he presents it beautifully. This book ranks up along with "Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men." "Winter of Our Discontent" isn't as familiar as these and other works, but it should be.

Rating:
Summary: Very difficult read
Review: Put me in mind of places and situations I've seen. Seemed to drag on though. Hard read with all the line chasing and pet names.

Rating:
Summary: Sublime Experience
Review: This was my first Steinbeck novel. If this is not his best (as the critics say) then I can't imagine what the others will be like. This is easily the best book I've read this year. Excellent piece of writing. The events of this book are in no way exclusively American, the message it conveys is a global one.

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