Wow! My head is reeling. I spent half of this novel in suspense, almost holding my breath, hoping that everything would turn out OK. The Winter of Our Discontent revolves around Ethan Hawley, a Harvard educated descendant of a wealthy family, who works as a grocery clerk to support his wife and two children. He is complex and fascinating - likable, flippant and so very frustrating.

Nobody in the small Long Island town of New Baytown is quite what they seem, and the lines between right and wrong keep shifting. I'm still not sure how to interpret the ending. So I will be pondering this novel for days or weeks. In awe.

I was forwarded a blog post recently (written by someone much sharper than me) that asked where our contemporary John Steinbecks have gone. The masterful fiction dedicated to the minimum wage worker, the family displaced by the Great Recession living out of a motel room, or anyone living from paycheck to paycheck seems largely extinct from the bestseller lists.

Hard luck stories about average American families fill newspapers, while in fiction, it seems like world building, not world reporting, are what get traffic. Steinbeck didn't have to worry about launching his author platform or getting retweeted in 1961 when his nineteenth novel was published. His storytelling, his vibrant and passionate depictions of the American worker, and his wisdom, are needed now more than ever.

The Winter of Our Discontent takes place between Good Friday and the Fourth of July, 1960 (Steinbeck apparently wrote the first draft during that same stretch of time). Rather than the Salinas Valley, the story takes place in the fictional hamlet of New Baytown, in northern Maine. The novel is narrated by Ethan Allen Hawley, a grocery clerk whose ancestors made their fortune as privateers (a discreet way of saying "pirates") on the seas.

The empire built by the Hawleys was squandered by Ethan's father through bad investments, while Ethan returned from war to briefly own and operate a grocery store that couldn't stay open. Now a mere employee in a store run by a Sicilian immigrant named Marullo. Ethan's boss regards him with equal parts pride and pity, grateful at the straight line that Ethan walks (never cheating or stealing) while also trying to advise the "kid" on how to make a dollar and a cent in this country. The key to the latter seems to come back to cheating or stealing.

Well-liked in spite of the acidic wit he dispenses around his wife Mary and adolescent children Ellen and Allen, Ethan's fortunes begin to change when his wife's friend, a gold digging floozy with a flair for fortune telling named Margie Young-Hunt, forecasts that Ethan is destined to become one of the most important men in town. The news is met with elation by Ethan's family, tired of being poor. Ethan opts to play the game for a while, to prove how easy it is to become a financial success and how little it changes things once you become one.

Ethan ends up being right on one count, wrong on the other.

A series of seemingly unrelated events fall into place around Ethan, each expertly crafted by Steinbeck. There's Ethan's childhood friend Danny Taylor, a Naval Academy washout whose disappointment to his family transformed him into the town drunk, albeit, a drunk who owns the most valuable real estate around. There's bank teller Joey Brophy, a cad who explains to Ethan how he'd rob a bank if he wanted to get away with it. There's Mr. Baker, a banker dogging Ethan to invest money left to Mary by her brother. Ethan learns of big changes coming to New Baytown and by virtue of his family name, seems poised to benefit.

Ethan doesn't feel sorry for himself or blame anyone for his mistakes as much as he's resigned to watch life from the sidelines now, sick of the hypocrisy his wife and his quiz show obsessed son seem eager to engage in. Ethan isn't the most likable narrator, but I could identify with him. I liked the way that Steinbeck balanced the Way It Used To Be (Ethan holds conversations with both his late grandfather Cap'n, the last mariner in the Hawley line, and his late Aunt Deborah, who taught her nephew how to use his mind and his conscience) with the way things seem to be headed.

In addition to the central character, I had some misgivings about the ending, but I take this as a virtue of the author for investing me in characters I care about. Margie Young-Hunt is a terrific character, a sexually liberated sorceress of a sort who doesn't feel sorry for herself either, and like Ethan, can't seem to resist making waves in the pond. Steinbeck's dialogue is so good and in this novel, we again glimpse what seem like real adults working over what seem like insurmountable economic or social problems at the kitchen table. Steinbeck's gift is making something so mundane so riveting on the page.

Of course, sometimes people can surprise us (and themselves), but I don't believe in such sudden metamorphoses and such a fundamental change of values. As a rule, people start seeing things and acting differently when being hit by crisis. The character of Ethan does not convince me and neither does the story. However, certain parts of the text do give some food for thought.
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'No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself. Now, sitting in the Place, out of the wind, seeing under the guardian lights the tide creep in, black from the dark sky, I wondered whether all men have a Place, or need a Place, or want one and have none. Sometimes I’ve seen a look in eyes, a frenzied animal look as of need for a quiet, secret place where soul-shivers can abate, where a man is one and can take stock of it. Of course I know of the theories of back to the womb and the deathwish, and these may be true of some men, but I don’t think they are true of me, except as easy ways of saying something that isn’t easy.'
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'They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war.'
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'There’s an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.'
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'A crime is something someone else commits.'
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'And in a ferocious jungle of the grass I found the distraction that meant peace.'