Review: “The Winter of Our Discontent” by John Steinbeck

Thumbs up for The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck. Literature.

It is a rare occasion on which I want to cry because of how good a book is. Not because it is written to evoke pathos; that’s not what I mean. I mean I wanted to cry because I was in the presence of a powerful genius, and I knew that I was reading, for the first time, a book that will forever be one of my favorites; and I knew that the last time in my life I will read it, many years from now, it will still make me want to cry for how good it is. It’s impossible to enumerate all of the reasons why this is so. But if you must know one thing: I love it because of how damn brave Steinbeck is. He does whatever he wants as long as it seems right to him. He switches back and forth between first and third person whenever he wants to. He makes up words when he feels like it. And above all he is silly, completely true and silly, in the way that real life is but literature so often shies away from. What other writer is so brave as to have – in a novel about the nature of morality, temptation, money, justification and pride – a main character who orates his thoughts in sermons in nonce Latin to the groceries of the store in which he is clerk?:

“I thought you were my friends! You didn’t raise a hand for me. Fair-weather oysters, fair-weather pickles, fair-weather cake-mix. No more unimus for you. Wonder what Saint Francis would say if a dog bit him, or a bird crapped on him. Would he say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Dog, grazie tanto, Signora Bird’?” He turned his head toward a rattling and a knocking and a pounding on the alley door, went quickly through the storeroom, muttering, “More customers than if we were open.”