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.