The Winter of Our Discontent

By John Steinbeck

This final novel by the Nobel Prize winner. It was written before he got that renowned dynamite and armement award.
This is a very strange novel. It is set in smalltown Long Island, a place where whaling was once a big industry supplying oil for lamps and such. The time is contemporary to when the novel was written, 1960.
Ethan Allen Hawley is the main character. Most of the novel is written in his first person voice. The Hawley’s were once a big family in town owning a whaling ship and a lot of prime real estate. Now Ethan only has the Hawley family house and works as a clerk, an employee, in the grocery store he once owned. He works for a “wop” and Italian immigrant. He is polite but two-faced bitter. He is a family man with a wife and two teen children, a boy and a girl.
His scheme is to win, get over by appearing totally honest, to sneak up and strike when no one is looking.

The novel has a tone of a good old America Our Town and while it keeps up that tone throughout, mostly by the voice of this jacular amiable Ethan, there is a rottenness that is permeating the whole place and this Ethen character. The rotten corruption becomes more obvious as the story moves on. Ethan’s schemes include heartlessly ratting out someone and perhaps giving enough rope to his alcoholic childhood best friend.

The reader is left with a bitter taste with no characters to really pull for other than perhaps the only sketched out women. Mary, Ethan's wife, seems nice enough and perhaps wouldn’t resort to the underhanded manipulations of her husband to get ahead. She doesn’t WANT to know the business, refuses to be told, and therefore maintains a facade of ignorant innocence.
Margie the town tramp with a heart of desperation is more interesting and somewhat likable, but she is plotting too, searching for some kind of security. Yet the novel doesn’t appear to want us to stretch our empathy to the extent of actually “liking” any of these poor people trapped in corrupt decaying USA. It is as if they made it that way themselves and maybe they have since they go along with continuing to perpetrate it.

Maybe the point of the novel is to illustrate that the USA is a soft nightmare of anti-social individualist insecurity. A fitting place to get an esteemed award from a dead armaments mogul.   

Dreamwatcher By Theodore Roszak

This novel is about dreams. The setting is a psychiatric clinic built around a doctor’s research into dream states. He has stumbled upon people who can tap into the dreams of others. He can help guide them into doing this. He can train people with these innate abilities. He can develop them into tools, “instruments”, to explore and indeed, effect, the dreamscapes of others. But early on in his career, some years ago, the potentially good doctor has fallen for the sick bargain of generous funding, a clinic in his name, but the cost is secrecy and control of a government intelligence agency.
The doctor’s instruments, his dreamwatchers are used by the mind control MK-ULTRA wing of intelligence to enter the dreams of people on their hit list and neutralize, discredit them by psychiatric manipulation. 
Roszak humainizes his big story with Deirdre, a dreamwatcher, who we come to know and gain sympathy for. She and the doctor, Devane, are the main players in the story. The doctor is a good guy but is trapped in a devil’s bargain. He wants the world to know and benefit from his work, but it must be kept secret as it has been bought and weaponized by ruthless power. The critical point comes when the doctor is ordered to destroy the serenity, and public stature of a radical Catholic nun from Central America. The CIA just doesn’t want her to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
The character of the nun brings in with her a childhood connection to indiginous  spirituality. She was taken off as a child and initiated by an aunt who was connected to that stream of ancient female shamanic energy, and training; this magic.

The novel tells an exciting suspenseful story around all this.
Is this just a fun fantasy read? Is it just a spy mind control adventure?
Dreams are so important. Are our dreams manipulated by power above us. In the novel to mess with people the dreamwatchers take them to a place of dark emptiness. At this writing Senator Bernie Sanders has just withdrawn from competition for a presidential nomination. In the address that contained his announcement he said something realated to the power of a dream:

"The greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision,” he said.

Are we watching over our power to dream? Are we keeping it clear from less than wholesome influence? What dreams, or nightmares, would come from power if it actually could influence our thoughts and mental well being?  Where are the borders between awake and dreaming? Are our stories related to dreams? Do they influence dreams? When we hear a story well told around a campfire, how does part of us enter that story, feel with it? What type of stories attract us? Do the most frightening ones draw us in because we are fragile and must be aware of environmental hazards?  Do we instinctively know we have to look out for danger? Is this being exploited for nothing more than commercial interest? 

This writer is aware of mass media influencing his own dreams. 

This happened just the other night after watching a good movie on a 13” computer screen for picture and stereo headphones for audio. 

The movie was Seberg about actor/activist Jean Seberg. The movie was not so much about her but, not so distant to the theme of Dreamwatcher, about government intelligence operatives messing with her business. They spy on her and ultimately try to destroy her by spreading lies about her. 

It is brought up here, not to review the movie itself but as an example of this powerful medium to enter into dreams. 

That night this viewer had a vivid dream of being with the character of Seberg in the movie in an apartment. This was not his first experience of this sort. In this case the movie was very good and the dream benign. This dream was about fitting into the environment of the lavish new all white NYC tower apartment setting, maybe class anxiety but not with longing, greed, or lust triggered by the movie. 

Yet the movie had the power to enter the dream in this way. An expensive mass media entertainment had the power to do that little trick. It wasn’t the first time and this dreamer is a fully developed elder adult far from the relatively open vessels of children who are increasingly exposed to screen dreams direct from powerful corporations who’s only goal is to manipulate them to increase their profit and power. 

Beyond that militant intelligence is also involved with the CIA using a massive portion of their budget to direct mass media in lines with their interests. 

This is not so from the melodrama of the plot line of Roszak’s very fine and thought provoking novel from the relatively innocent times of the 1980s.

Dangling Man by Saul Bellow

This was Bellow’s first novel.

It is set in Chicago during WWII.
The character, Joseph, writes about his life in first person journal entries. He is in his 30s. He is dangling because he might get drafted into the army soon. Since he might be drafted he is not working. He is married and his wife is working. He is basically just hanging out. They are living in a rooming house.They lost their apartment because of a dispute he had with the landlord.

It is a short novel of one of those extended times between things, before something big might happen. In this case being called up into a war that one might get killed in. The novel is mostly internal dialogue of someone in one of these in between times, and a very stressful one. It is also a portrait of a man without an exterior structure to control his time and actions. It is a place that many find difficult to find comfort. It is easier to just let someone else tell one what to do, show up here, at this time, do this job for this long, eat at this time, etc. He is dangling outside of that structure for a time, that place where one has to be self motivated, or self contained enough to be at peace when the order of the day is to run with the crowd. The novel shows that this can be a difficult place where one needs to be very strong, assured of oneself enough to go on.

There is not much mention of the war.  A war, that at the time of the novel’s composition no one knows  what is going to happen, how long the war will go on, how many will die, or who will win. The book contains that tension that hangs right there alongside that dangling man. It is an extreme time of “we are all together” which can be harder than usual on the temperamentally alienated.

Joseph visits family. His prosperous brother tries to give him money which creates tension. He visits his wife’s family, more tension. There is conflict in the rooming house, and between him and his wife, in the role reversal of the man being the breadwinner.

Aren't we all dangling on the edge of life on the mysterious precipice of death?
What does one do while dangling?

Good novel from a man who was later awarded The Nobel Prize (The Dynamite Prize).