Everyman's Library is putting out a new James M. Cain
anthology this month or next: THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE,
DOUBLE INDEMNITY, MILDRED PIERCE, AND SELECTED STORIES,
edited by Robert Polito. The stories are
"Pastorale," "The Baby in the Icebox," "Dead Man,' "Brush
Fire," and "The Girl in the Storm." I've seen two reviews of
this in the last week.
The first was in TORO, a glossy Canadian magazine that's of
the kind that gets sent around with newspapers free a couple
of times, then probably goes bankrupt. Andy Lamey reviews the
anthology, and ends with this:
| He seems to fall into that overlooked category of author,
of which
| children's literature provides the most examples, who find
a last and
| posthumous audience despite offering little in the way of
profundity.
| Aesop. The Brothers Grimm. Lucy Maud Montgomery. Arthur
Conan Doyle.
| Dashiell Hammett. J.R.R. Tolkien. If we continue to read
such writers,
| it is not for their "complexity and difficulty," but,
rather, the
| pleasure of their stories. Perhaps we need to widen our
view of
| posterity as one giant university library, and place
alongside it
| a nursery and folklorist's archive. And a saloon. Inside of
which,
| down by the bar, Jimmy Cain still sits with his feet on the
rail,
| telling stories about killing.
I bet you don't think much of that, but you'll like Michael
Tolkin's review in the 16 June issue of THE NATION. He has a
deeper understanding of Cain and of writing in general, and
he ranks Cain highly:
| Reading Cain again, I am surprised not that he holds up but
that
| seventy years later, his prickly defensiveness seems like
modesty.
| He's one of the great writers.
| It takes nothing away from POSTMAN and DOUBLE INDEMNITY to
put them
| on the crime shelf, the honestly arranged shelf that would
also
| include Dostoevsky and Highsmith.... But if we arrange by
genre and
| not by alphabet, MILDRED PIERCE doesn't belong there. It's
as good
| a novel as DANIEL DERONDA and ANNA KARENINA.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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