["Mildred Pierce"] has about three books worth of plot: financial ups and downs, everyone in bed with everyone else, six punchy trick endings one after another. Yet it has many good things. Cain makes no pretensions whatsoever to being a social novelist, but the scenes of Mildred looking for a job, Mildred waiting on table, and Mildred talking to the rich mother of the boy who got Veda into [James T.] Farrell's favorite condition, are bitter, incisive and unquestionably authentic. Cain's talent is the hare to Farrell's tortoise. He is a slick and accomplished writer, with a genius for effective, sparse dialogue and tight, neat plots with trick endings, preferably ringing twice. Like Farrell, he has been kidded out of the worst of his excesses,… but unlike Farrell he has now become readable.
And yet, for all of Farrell's weakness and Cain's competence, "Mildred Pierce" is essentially a more minor work than "Ellen Rogers." Weak and unimportant as the Farrell book is, it at least deals with believable people living in a real world, in a tangible city with streets in it. Cain deals with ciphers, picturesque cardboard characters whom he cuts into attractive designs. He has certain specified knowledges that he draws on in all of his novels: the workings of the law, the inside of the restaurant business and the world of music…. He has a few favorite themes: fate, the relationship of art and sex, and particularly the relationship of sex and violence. All his books give the sense of having been pieced together skillfully out of these shiny bits of glass, having no organic existence or internal necessity. The blurb speaks of Cain as a "first-rate storyteller," which is so unconsciously fair and exact an estimate of his ability as well as his limitations that no reviewer can add more, except to say that "Mildred Pierce" doesn't seem to be so shocking as either "The Postman Always Rings Twice" or "Serenade," his first two. (p. 442)
This is a free excerpt of 329 words. There are 355 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Cain, James M(allahan) 1892–1977: Critical Essay by Stanley Edgar Hyman Access Pass.
