In Cain's best fiction, aesthetic distance is achieved and sustained partly because of his obsessively objective, neutral, dispassionate attitude toward the basic elements of his novels. His techniques forcibly, deliberately, and continually turn us back to the pure experience itself. (p. 61)

[In Serenade] Cain shows how one man seizes the American dream of success and how it conflicts with his dream of the primitive woman. (p. 63)

In Cain's novels, the amateur hero's relationship is simply with a woman, and they go on what Cain calls a love rack together because one of them wishes for something and the wish comes true. When the American dream comes true, it turns into a nightmare in an everlasting present in which the lovers are isolated from the human community…. Cain's heroes are inside-dopesters with an impulse to self-dramatization who speak in an aggressive voice and who fall from a height they...