The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just read this–again. As I noted in a recent blog post, this was a happy accident, because a re-reading enriched my understanding of one of Steinbeck’s last novels. Here is what I wrote after my reading of the book in 2012:

What do we do when life doesn’t work out as we had dreamed it? What do we do when our status is inferior to that of others and the community around us including our family point this out to us? John Steinbeck explores this dilemma through the narrative of Ethan Allen Hawley, the descendant of an old New England family of sea captains. Hawley, however, is reduced to being a clerk in a grocery store he lost to debt that is now owned by an Italian immigrant.

Though not unhappy himself with his lot, prodded by the urgings of others and discontent within his family, he enters a “winter of discontent” and suspends his own sense of honor and ethics in setting in motion a series of events to change his standing in the town. The question he does not consider is, will he be able to live with the outcome for him and his family and what he may become?

A probing novel that explores how we confront our own discontentedness.

I would concur with all of this but in my re-reading, I was much more aware of Steinbeck’s commentary on the hypocrisy of our social morality, where cutting corners, ruthless competition, under-cutting friends, and betraying loyalties are just the way the game is played and the main rule is not to get caught at it. Hawley’s character serves as a mirror that exposes this in all its ugly detail in his honesty and lack of driving ambition, and then in the turn in which he carries the logic of betrayal and ruthlessness to its logical conclusion and ends up playing the game better than all the others, betraying friends resulting in the deportation of one and death of another, and in ruthless negotiation that leaves the “petty immoral” wondering what they have created.

All this comes at a cost for Hawley as he realizes that his own “light” has died. How will he live between an ambitious son already caught up in the game, and a daughter still “holding onto the light” in the form of a family talisman? And his own struggle raises the question of what it means to live with oneself in the “little deaths” to integrity that “playing the game” seems to require.

Even in the larger Christian community these are pressing issues as we’ve been regaled by stories of a prominent pastor who plagiarized work and employed those who manipulated publication data. Negotiating the “winter of discontent” in our lives and not allowing our “light” to be extinguished is a challenge we all face. And one wonders why Steinbeck situates Ethan’s moral turning point between Good Friday and Easter? Does this not point up the alternatives of betrayal and denial versus the dying to self that alone sustains life and light? I don’t know if that was in Steinbeck’s mind, but it is something I cannot help considering.

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