John Mccullough's Reviews > The Winter of Our Discontent

This is Steinbeck’s last novel, published in 1961 seven years before he died. Not as universally revered as earlier novels, it still has a real sting and master’s mark on it from page one.

Lamb to the slaughter. The reader can see it coming a mile away. Ethan Allen Hawley is more than an easy mark. He walks around town with a target on his back. At the beginning, glum, embarrassed Ethan walks the halls of despair. A proud but penniless Hawley manages a grocery store that he once owned. But Margie, a friend of his wife and a practiced tarot card reader, informs his wife, Mary, that fortunes will come to the Hawleys, and soon. Now that it is predicted that fortune will smile on Ethan, and from not-so-subtle snipes from Mary and others around him about how tiresome poverty can be, he is a different man, a happier man, a wise man. At least in his own mind. Already saturated with the family history of having been cheated by the smart money, reputable thieves like the town banker, Ethan is an easy mark for an aggressive but subtle campaign to regain the money, and thus town respectability and status.

With the stings of how his family was several times cheated out of its fortune, and thus good community standing, and the prediction of better times, accepting, quiet Ethan begins to adjust his attitude, flex his assertiveness, and plunges into the unknown world of hard-knuckle dealings, maybe even a bit of not so honest stuff. Some of this is kindness of a sort, some is tough bargaining and some is tom-foolery. Steinbeck leads us through many twists and turns to a surprise conclusion to this new Ethan Hawley enterprise. He seems to try a new tack on a New England setting, but still hammers on the question of what is moral? Are we all moral? Are we all moral fakes at heart, able to fool our family, friends and neighbors? Is everyone this way? Are open cheaters the only honest people?

Spiced with many light moments, even tragi-comedic moments, Steinbeck entertains while still smacking us in the face with the basic dishonesty and savage darwinism that underlies our capitalist-American economic system. This is a good time to remind ourselves of and come to terms with who we really are as a people. And who we could be, who we ought to be.