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ungrammatically, and she cannot fathom either her husband’s mind or Margie Young-Hunt’s character.
    Throughout the book, conversations are similarly packed with irony and parody. Speeches mask intentions, conveying the uneasiness and essential isolation of each character in the novel. The deliberate shifting of contexts and moods contains both Ethan’s rebellion and his anguish about the morality of “looking out for number one” or claiming that “everybody does it . . . —just read the papers”—phrases that beat ominously throughout the book. Literalizing the book’s verbal dexterity is the mask Ethan has on hand for his planned robbery—Mickey Mouse. A silly mask covering deadly designs is the perfect metaphor for Ethan’s dialogues. He’s a ventriloquist. He’s a trickster—hardly surprising for a hero who gambles his soul.
    This is clearly not the world evoked in The Grapes of Wrath, where an order existed outside the text, even if temporarily disrupted within. In The Winter of Our Discontent, there is no such order apparent. We don’t know Hawley—intentionally; can’t identify a voice that is authentically his—intentionally; and have difficulty judging whether his action is reprehensible or unavoidable—intentionally. Appropriately, it’s his son’s plagiarized essay, a written and performed amalgam of cultural dialogues, that finally brings Ethan to a nasty confrontation with his own tactics. His son’s inauthentic voice, in effect, is more extravagantly out of whack than his own. Checkmate.
    Critics did not find much to love in Ethan, a difficult character to get a bead on. Resistance came first from those closest to Steinbeck: His wife, Elaine, didn’t like the cloying tone of Ethan’s speech; his agent, Elizabeth Otis, hated the novel, even after being instructed by Steinbeck to read it as a “unit” because it was a “whole thing in time, place, and direction.” And his editor, Pascal Covici, greeted it with a lackluster sigh.
    Steinbeck withstood the opprobrium from his own circle and, as suggested, rewrote parts of the text; he omitted bits of Ethan’s windy speeches and cut the suggestion of incest between Ethan’s children, Ellen and Allen—undoubtedly intended to further illustrate depravity of contemporary life. But after the novel was published and reviews were decidedly mixed, he sank into a deep depression—an emotional trough that yawned deeper than any previous ones of his career, perhaps because the writerly stakes had been so very high: Create or die. Few critics seemed to comprehend the risks he’d taken with Ethan’s voice. Several judgments in particular must have stung. The New Republic declared the book “a failure.” Time —the magazine that had never given him a particularly positive review— quipped that the book “sounds curiously like late-middle-aged petulance.” The New York Herald Tribune resisted the “implausibility at the heart of it,” and Orville Prescott of the New York Times disliked the “manner of the writing,” which he found “jocular, gay and flippant.” He concluded, “Satire, if it is to draw blood, inspire feelings of guilt and contrition, cannot afford to seem too light and playful.”
    Indeed, critics dealt out a good number of aughts and shoulds, suggesting repeatedly that a book with a moral theme must assume a weighty tone. “This book whimpers where it should bang,” intoned the critic for America, while Melvin Maddocks of the Christian Science Monitor asserted that since Steinbeck’s “natural hero is the primitive,” he should not stray to “man as a social creature.” And Granville Hicks of the Saturday Review thought Steinbeck’s book “superficial. He says nothing, for instance, about the fact that our whole economy depends on the production and consumption of more and more unnecessary goods, and he says nothing about the part that advertising plays. . . .” That seems so wildly beside the point that