The Winter of Our Discontent John Steinbeck, copywrite 1961 Viking Press

I love John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books, and I had read all of his earlier works. I still have not read East of Eden.

I wish I could say that I read The Winter of Our Discontent because I was making a concious effort to fill in the gaps of my literary experience. However, that would be a lie. The truth is, I saw this paperback at a yard sale for .50 cents and snapped it up like the Queen of Cheap that I am. An awesome read for less than the 1961 cover price: who could ask for anything more?

But Winter is a lot more than a darn good story and a study of one man's moral charecter. For a reader like me, born after the Kennedy assassination, it is a window into another world....the world I was more or less born into, the world in which many of our traditions are rooted, but a world that, for better or worse, is as lost and gone forever as the mythical city of Atlantis.

Steinbeck aquaints us with Ethan Allen Hawley, a New England WASP on the skids, an Angry White Man before most serious literary characters were anything but white and men. Poor business decisions made by his father have put Ethan in a bad position upon his return from combat during the second wold war. Economic pressure, and risk avoidence in favor of keeping his family home have left this decendant of whaling ship captains stranded, working as a grocery clerk in the grocery market he once owned. His bitterness comes across loud and clear as much through his jokes, and pleasantries as through his believable internal dialouge.

Winter is a book about corruption, yet it takes place in a time which now seems impossibly innocent in some ways. This is the world before supermarkets, before drive in banking, before fast food. It's a world where television is new and exciting, public cursing is unheard of, in which women talk about their "figure" when they mean their bodies. It's also a world in which Ethan calls his boss by an ethnic ephitaph to his face, and his banker advises him to invest his wife's money without her knowlege or consent, stating, "There's too much petticoat in business these days." Early in the book we find dialouge that could not be written today. Indeed, it could hardly be thought of.

Maurullo, an Italian immigrant, the grocery owner, has told Ethan not to trim the cauliflower before weighing it, starting a hot tempered argument:

"...You listen to me," he shouted, "Hawley's have been living here since the middle seventeen hundreds. You're a foriegner...We've been getting along with our neighbors and being decent all that time. You think you can barge in from Sicily and change that, you're wrong. If you want my job you can have it - right here, right now. And don't call me kid or I'll punch you in the nose-"

" You don't have to talk dago talk," he said softly.

Okay, then! With all that out in the open, the two men manage to get over it without anybody calling the Anti-defamation league.

Of course, it isn't true that Hawley and his neighbors have been getting along, treating each other decently all that time. While he still has a social connection with his banker, Mr. Baker, based on business partnerships the Baker and Hawley families had in the past, it's not no longer a relationship of equals, and Hawley is aware of his grandfather's suspicions that members of the Baker family once set a ship afire for the insurance money.

Ethan has compelling reasons for wanting to regain his old position. The social slights suffered by his loyal wife and the future of his children weigh heavily on a man who is honest and honorable by nature. But the world is changing, and Ethan must change with it. Town bad girl, the divorcee Margie Young-Hunt captures the essence of his transformation in a vision of a snake shedding it's skin. Ethan isn't turning into something else. As he plans to rob a bank, turn in his employer to immigration authorities, start a rumor campaign, and passively bring about the death of his childhood friend, he's just shedding an outer layer, a veneer of civility.

Most tellingly, though, about the time in which it was written is Ethan's reaction of astonishment and outrage at his son's lack of ethics. A 14 year old in the book, fictional Allen Hawely will be just about the right age to burn the flag when the time comes. Reading in 2004, we know that people will commit much worse sins than overtrimming cabbage. Reading in 2004 the book reminds us that a person, a society, or a nation goes down any road in small, incrimental steps: a rumor here, the bending of the law to ones own advantage there...50 years later you've got Enron.

Still, like all Steinbeck characters, Ethan Hawely is not good or bad, just intensely human, and likeable because of it. An unflinching moralist, Steinbeck does not let him off the hook lightly, indeed, not at all. Yet, there is an element of hope for the future in Winter's ending. By the time the book ends we've been introduced to so many people who are corrupt in so many ways we realize we have failed to really see the one shining light in the book until the end....which, naturally, I'm not going to give away.

Pick it up at the library, if you don't find it at a yard sale near you.