Books: Season’s Ugliest

MILDRED PIERCE—James M. Cam—Knopf ($2.50).

James Mallahan Cain’s first novel (The Postman Always Rings Twice) was a tawdry, expert shocker. His second (Serenade) was a highly spiced account of singing and sex in Mexico. His third (Mildred Pierce) is the most interesting of the three. It is about almost ordinary people: a Glendale, Calif, housewife, her husband, her two lovers, her business, her daughter. It is as ugly as Hitler’s My New Order, even nearer home, and much more readable.

Mr. Cain’s three fascinations are the Laocoönic stranglings of sex, money (or its lack) and snobbery. His heroine, Mildred Pierce, finds herself entangled in all three. Divorced after eleven tame years of marriage, she finally manages to support her children through a pie-bakery. But little else in her life is quite as easy as pie. The first of her lovers, her husband’s ex-partner, is only too ready to betray her when it means money to him. Her second, an insolvent playboy, blandly accepts her money, calls himself her gigolo, sneers over her with her daughter Veda as a working woman, a moneygrubber, a “varlet.”

James Cain has a cold authority about suburban vice which could yield an invaluable gloss on Middletown or even on the works of Lardner and O’Hara. His trouble is not knowing when to stop. His money gets so cold, his sex so hot, his snobbery so snakelike and his dirty work so predictably subhuman, that their victims are scarcely more than caricatures of human fallibility. But the drugstore-library sensationalism that still overhangs Cain’s work does not stop him from being one of the most readable storytellers in the U.S. He has broadened his subject matter and, with a cruel anthropologist’s tenacity, virtually wrung it dry.