The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

This 1961 was the last novel Steinbeck completed before his death. In 1962 Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature, not for this book but as was stated by the Nobel Committee at the time this book made clear that his greatness had not diminished and cast a bright light on his great works of the late thirties and early forties.

As to the reviews at the time of it's publication they were not their kind. Over time this book has been reassessed and now is considered along with the Steinbeck classics East of Eden, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath as one of his best.

For me, personally, this book was one of, if not the most affecting, of the Steinbeck books. The conflict between ethics and money, contentment and coveting, the internal heart and the external desires was so well portrayed in this book that if one allows it they feel this story to their bones.

Ethan Allen Hawley lives in a fictional Long Island town. Ethan's family goes back centuries, his grandfathers and great grandfathers were sea captains, captaining whaling ships and owning much of the town of New Baytown. While Ethan was away serving his country in World War II Ethan's father made some poor investments and lost everything except the family home. When Ethan came home he was reduced to becoming a clerk in the grocery store that the family previously owned.

Ethan is a rare man however. He would like more things, to have wealth, but he is a content man. He understands what is important and holds onto his pride in his family and family history. He conducts himself with kindness and a sense of ethic that he feels, he knows is rare in the world.

Still Ethan has troubles and his heart is aching. His wife whom he loves aches to " hold her head up", she is tired of being poor and in moments of sharp pointed jesting refers to him as a grocery clerk. His teenage children would like more money, his son Allen consistently pointing out all the things they do not have, first and foremost a television. Ethan feels the pull of wanting to be more if only to try to settle his family. Every man wants to feel like a provider and Ethan is no different.

Still Ethan persists. He runs the store for the owner, an Italian immigrant named Alfie Marullo. Working next to the bank he is consistently badgered by the banks owner Mr. Baker to put the money in his bank account, received by his wife upon her brothers death. Ethan suspects that Baker feels guilty over whatever transpired during the war years when he was away and his father was losing all the family assets, he does not know how Baker was complicit but feels he was. Even more assuredly Ethan believes a family rumor that his Grandfather and Baker's forebears had a falling out when partnering on a whaling ship. The ship burned to the hulls in the bay, deemed an accident the insurance company paid but Ethan's grandad always suspected the Baker forebear of arson.

Ethan talks to the cans and vegetables on the shelf in the store. He visits daily with Joey Morphy the bank teller next door and Ethan begins to wonder if he should not suspend his ethics for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, so that he can jump ahead in the town. He assures himself that in the war he killed people without being a killer, so could he not be unethical for a short time to get ahead and then resume to his natural bent.

Ethan concocts a plan and while it does not go as planned eventually his fortunes do change. He is not thrilled so much as glad to be able to resume his ethical course, his anger at Baker is given a tangible release, and all seems well. His son, the materialist, however has had his own ethical crisis and the fruits of that are coming home. Unlike Ethan however he feels no remorse or need to justify, he just wants to look out for number one. This causes a crisis of faith Ethan felt he had long ago resolved.

A couple of quotes in this book are for the books. Speaking about a house with teenagers in it who are being quiet Ethan advises that being in a house with teenagers not physically present is much quieter than being in a house with teenagers in it that are being silent. Why? Because teenagers even being quiet roil the air in a way that can be deafening. It is so true.

More perceptive even is the claim that people never want advice, they only want corroboration and I will tell you from a lifetime of experience both professionally and personally that nothing truer has ever been said. When you find someone who asks your advice and truly wants it embrace that person, he is rarer than a buffalo nickel.

I cannot speak highly enough of this book but I will caution that it is not a book to just read for the story, be prepared to have your mind and reason challenged. Steinbeck wanted to right a book about the struggle to maintain personal morality in a materialistic world. For ones sleep patterns he might have accomplished his goal all too well.

Revisiting The Yellow Birds

I wrote a few weeks ago about this debut novel by Iraq War Veteran Kevin Powers that has been called the best book of the year. When I read the book I was moved and amazed at how wonderful the book is.

For a person such as me who is always reading something it sometimes is hard to take a step back and say this is an exceptional book. Not just a great book like I am always saying a book is, but a very outstanding, an exceptional book.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers is exceptional. It is Hemingwayesque. The author appeared on Morning Joe this morning and he was soft spoken and understated. The group around the desk was all in agreement at how wonderful the book was and as Joe Scarborough read the first paragraph it became clear that this book is something rare, something that will become part of the literature of the American canon. With a first line " The war tried to kill us in the spring" what becomes immediately clear is that the blurb on the cover by Tom Wolfe that this is the All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars is not hyperbole. It is simply the truth.

If you read one book this year. This is the one. There are not enough positive adjectives for how meaningful this book is.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

Short stories are my thing. As much as I love all types of books, literature and biography I am a big fan of the short story. In the second half of the twentieth century Raymond Carver was one of the Masters of the form. As John Cheever wrote often about the characters of Long Island, New York City and suburban Connecticut Carver too writes often about the same characters. Carver's however are darker, often plied with alcohol and often with violence just below the surface.

Not all of Carver's stories work for me. However when his stories work, they work extremely well. Gazebo is the first of the winning stories in the collection. A couple with dreams of improving their lives remembers a gazebo they have seen in the past and pictures that as the epitome of married bliss, while they deal with the troubles in their young marriage.

I Could See the Smallest Things in just four pages expresses the under the radar pain of a friendship between two working men, neighbors, who have fallen out of friendship. Only Carver could have a man out digging night crawlers at three in the morning speak to his neighbors wife out to close a forgotten gate and convey so much with a message to her husband that he says hi.

In this stage perhaps Carver had a thing for the subtext of water. In perhaps the most famous story from the collection, " The Bath", features a family celebrating a young boys birthday. When the boy is injured and in the hospital with a life threatening injury the world outside keeps turning and in " So Much Water Close to Home" a group of men who discover the body of a drowned girl they are not prepared for the anger directed at them when they finish their fishing trip before reporting it. Clearly cell phones would have been a huge asset to these gentlemen.

The title story is a bit longer and features two couples discussing love. All four middle aged, at one point they were all married to others, have differing opinions as to the meaning of love. Just under the surface the differences between the characters opinions are a bit more in conflict and as the gin flows the conversation does too. In the end nothing really happens, the more they try to express what love really is, the more they cannot speak to it. As the story ends the couples, drunk before it gets dark are hungry and would like to go get some food. Still, thinking in their interior about what is love, no one moves and the story ends.

An uneven collection, still with some very valuable stories.

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

This book ended Cormac McCarthy's Western Trilogy with it's release in 1998. McCarthy over my reading of this set of books has become one of my favorite authors. It is impossible to read his work without seeing a straight line from Hemingway to McCarthy and for someone who considers Hemingway his favorite author this is a road I am glad to travel.

In Cities of the Plain we revisit a character from each of the first two books in the series, John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing. The year is 1952 and though Parham is nine years older than the nineteen year old Cole the two have developed a brotherly relationship. Certainly with Billy's loss of his brother Boyd in the previous story this in understandable.

The major events in this book take place South of the border in Ciudad Juarez a border town across from El Paso. As the boys from the ranch go across the border one night and go into a brothel John's friends encourage him to partake of one of the women who catches his eye. He declines however and as the story we see the cowboys doing all kinds of cowboy things. Roping cattle, catching wild dogs bringing down calves keeps the boys busy. Unbeknownst to his friends however John Grady Cole has returned south of the border and has started spending time with the young prostitute who has moved to a different brothel, one owned by a very dark character named Eduardo.

Soon Billy Parham and the rest of his friends know that John has a problem and it is becoming bigger and bigger. No longer in lust, he now is in love and he wants to bring this girl out of the brothel and marry her. Eduardo however has no desire to let that happen, he will not let Cole buy her out, it is all complicated by the fact that Eduardo is in love with the young prostitute as well.

This book captures all of the glory of the first two books and brings the characters into the twentieth century. McCarthy's talent is on display here on every page. The scenes that he depicts are beautiful and clear. The relationship between the cowboys is so attractive to someone watching in modern times, the simplicity, the honesty, and the lack of sarcasm and easy rudeness is as attractive as the vivid scenery that the author describes.

Other characters in the book are deeper than any we have seen even in the first two books, at least in terms of secondary characters. On his travels South of the border John Grady meets and establishes a friendship with an elderly blind musician. He also is reverential in his dealings with Mr. Johnson, the elderly patriarch of the ranching family for whom he works. Sitting on the porch with Mr. Johnson as he has wandered out in his long underwear and hearing the stories of the old man's days on the plains driving cattle north, days that he calls the best of his life.

Billy while not the major character in the story, is still a big part of the story and his ultimate decency makes him the most unsullied character in the story. He is a friend in need and a friend indeed as cliched as that is. When the book ends the sorrow he feels over the end we see coming is palpable.

Upon the completion of the book we are given an epilogue. In this we see what happened to Billy in the second half of the century. He travels the country, finding ways to earn a living, as the ranching and cowboy life that he has known ends under his feet. In the final scenes of the epilogue Billy in his seventies is staying dry under an overpass when he spies an old Indian man on the opposite side. The man comes to sit with them and as they talk he tells Billy a story about a dream he had and a dream the character in his dream had. In the end he offers thoughts and questions about what is life and where is reality and where does it end. As McCarthy spins the vision we are allowed to be amused by Billy, even in his seventies playing the innocent asking questions that have more to do with the logistics of the vision than the hidden deep meanings. Later we are told that Billy continues to wander until following the river he is taken in a by a family who find in him something special, he greets the children as they come home from school, teaches them how to ride and feels a level of being home one senses he has not felt for a long time.

As the story of Billy finally comes to an end he is having a very vivid dream and wakes the wife of the family with whom he is staying. She asks him if he would like a drink and reading Billy, an almost eighty year old man still uncomfortable with women saying " Yes Ma'am " with his best manners one is struck by the anomaly of one of the cowboys of lifetimes ago coming to the end of his life in the new millennium. He tells the woman of his dream of his brother Boyd, long dead, and says he wishes everyday that he could spend some time with him, see him ride, one last time. After the woman settles him he tells her that " He is not who she thinks he is." The wife counters will a self assured " We know just what you are." By the end of this story we do to.

Billy, is one of the most enduring characters of twentieth century literature, and perhaps McCarthy's greatest creation. Understated in everything he does, and a hero we would all be proud to know. Yes Billy we all know just who you are.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I remember in high school having to read this book in Junior English class and then we subsequently watched the movie. At the time most of what I remember of the movie is that we thought that some of the characters in the mental hospital were quite funny.

Recently I watched the movie for what was the first time in thirty years and it really was quite a revalation. Not just the movie itself but a few different things.

The movie based on the book of same name by sixties icon Ken Kesey won multiple Oscars in 1975 including Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress. Louise Fletcher playing the terrible nurse ratchet won the Best Actress Oscar. Her portrayal upon this watching is for me offers more depth and is not a totally unidentifiable character. Jack Nicholson for as long as I can remember has been considered a great actor, but with at least to my estimation no real movies to back that up. Sure he was over the top good in A Few Good Men but that role was all but a caricature.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest however we see a shining example of Nicholson's talent. Playing Randle McMurphy he is a tour de force. McMurphy in prison is tired of the work farm and is pleased as punch to be getting what he calls easy duty at the nuthouse. As he makes friends with the various inmates in his ward he comes to feel sadly for them and also angry at what he deems the pointless intransigence of Nurse Ratchet. In one early scene he steals out the gate, commandeers a bus that has come to take the better behaved inmates on an outing and loading the bus with his friends, after picking up a party girl friend of his takes them fishing on a stolen boat. As he says however what can they do to him. What he does not understand and soon finds out is that now that he is in the mental health system he is not automatically released at the end of his scheduled prison sentence.

This, as one might expect, does not sit well and McMurphy causes as scene that eventually leads to him and two other patients being taken upstairs for electroshock therapy.

Watching the movie this time I could not help but but be stunned at the performance of Will Sampson as the Chief. The Chief is a towering man, close to seven feet tall who is , as the saying goes, deaf and dumb, consequently spending his days pushing a broom aimlessly. Early in the movie McMurphy, wanting to use the Chief's height for easy baskets attempts to teach him to play basketball. It does not work. Eventually however as Randall treats the Chief with respect the Chief comes to trust Randall and the next time we see a basketball game on the court. Something magical happens in this game. Randall again sets up the Chief under the hoop and when he passes the ball to the Chief he, without jumping, just pushes it to the hoop for an easy basket. One could call it a an early sixties flatfooted alley oop and it works. After a couple of these the Chief, if it is possible, grows even taller, and you see him not stumble down the court but run the length of it to set up for defense. As one might imagine a seven foot Indian is quite a presence in a pick up basketball game at a mental hospital. From there the Chief still not speaking and unable to understand language grows close to McMurphy to the point where he is one of the three sent upstairs for shock treatment as he had defended McMurphy when his trouble turned physical.

After returning from shock treatment McMurphy would like to be good but his distaste for Nurse Ratchet makes that impossible. He sets up an escape plan that is a little too efficient and leads to some events that will change everybody's life forever. The ending of this movie is sad and moving and again we are left with the understanding that The Chief is the moral center of this movie in ways that are not understood with a passing viewing.

I mentioned Nurse Ratchet as not, in this viewing, to me at least being the all evil character we often think about when we think of the movie. One must understand that in 1962 the world was a different place. Kesey was one of the major counter cultural figures of the sixties and there was not much room for nuance in his portrayal of Ratchet but nuance there is. You could realize that here she was a nurse running a ward, trying to follow a schedule, and you get this career petty criminal who comes in and causes trouble. Clearly she reacted in a way that was authoritarian but I do not think in a real world situation she was necessarily evil.

It was Kesey's story and of course Milos Forman directed the movie the same way and Ratchet has become an iconic example of a dictatorial, by the book, female authority figure.

Now that my commercial for understanding of Nurse Ratchet is over the one thing that one should take away is that this is a great film. Lasser as Ratchet has depth, Nicholson fills the screen in every scene, and many of the actors, including a young Danny Devito became faces that we are all well familiar with. And of course The Chief.

A great film.

All the King's Men

This 1949 movie based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name mirrored that success with an Oscar for Best Picture.

Very few, if any, Pulitzer Prize winning books have become best picture winners in the film version so this should stand very well that the movie is a winning effort.

For me however this is just not the case. The movie to me started very strongly and I was very interested in the character Willie Stark as he suffered indignities as he strove to improve himself. The movie however did not improve from there. Clearly the movie follows the book and the book is a thinly veiled representation of the real life demagogue Huey Long of Louisiana but it seems to me that the movie made everything just a little too simple.

Perhaps having a short time frame to tell a movie in just does not compare to the nuanced views we can see today in shows such as Boardwalk Empire and earlier The Soprano's. Good men with evil in them or evil men with good in them. The transformation of Willie Stark however does not brim over with complexity.

Started in politics as a " dummy", that is a hick to split the vote that would have otherwise have gone to a feared challenger so that the establishment candidate can win Willie learns of the plot and rebels. He becomes a populist demagogue calling his target audience that they are hicks and only a hick, like he Willie Stark, can help a hick.

Once in office Stark has very redeemable goals. Free health care, accessible free education, good roads for farmers to get their product to market, all of these and more are certainly commendable. To make these things happen however Willie will make deals which are not clean. Moreover for Willie politics becomes blood sport, those that get in his way are removed one way or the other. Eventually as one might expect Willie's downfall comes. Leaving one to wonder what might have been had he lived, and if it is possible for anyone to have clean goals and accomplish them in clean ways.

Broderick Crawford won an Oscar for his performance and deservedly so. With his large forehead free of hair with his hairstyle I chuckled to myself waiting for him to do a Jackie Gleason impression but of course this movie was well before " The Great One's " debut.

This movie was solid but I must admit it is nothing close to an Oscar Winner and when one realizes that just a couple of years later Hitchcock was making his stunning run of movies in the early fifties one sees how this movie came at the tail end of a production era that was just abut done. This in itself might well be why this movie seems so dated but for whatever reason this movie can be deemed nothing more than a disappointment.

Uno by Green Day

This past September Green Day released this album which we are told is to be the first of three releases over a period of just a few months. With Dos out soon and Tres not soon after over the last few days I have listened to this the first record a few times and would have to color myself unimpressed.

Truth told I have never been a big fan of the band so this is no surprise. I think that American Idiot was a good album and certainly Wake Me Up When September Ends was a great song and a powerful video but the truth is that song was a bit of a departure from much of what the band has done.

As the band settles well into middle age they, to my uneducated eyes, seem to be struggling to stay relevant. Certainly Billie Joe Armstrong's meltdown at a recent charity concert leads one to suspect that perhaps being a punk band twenty five years after it's beginning is a perplexing thing.

The album itself is pretty bland. A few driving beats, some naughty words, and Armstrong's unique voice can still barely make your foot tap. It is just all so predictable, nothing is new, it has all been done a million times. There is just nothing original in the sound.

That is not to say the band has no merit. Some songs are better than others on every album and this one is no different. The second song on the album is called Stay the Night and certainly it has some appeal. Perhaps my big issue with Green Day is that same damn speed guitar riff over and over. It all seems so forced, all the songs with f2*k in them like it was off a checklist.

Kill The DJ is a neat little number in that it is slightly different and if nothing else expresses a sentiment that we have all felt, certainly if we have gone to any club where all they play is that awful dance music. Better than that is Fell For You which sounds a bit like a cross between The Ramones and a fifties band if, that is, a fifties band was talking about pissing the bed.


The first single, and as the albums are so close together in their release dates, the song that might well be most remembered in this whole three album production is called Oh Love and it is certainly superior to the rest of the albums. With that in mind however it still is nothing special and after four listenings you really do not care if you ever hear it again.

Perhaps the second and third albums will be better, they are supposed to each have a theme so there is hope. If not however it seems to me we may be looking at a band that has stayed too long at the party.