> on 7/12/03 9:38 AM, Mario Taboada at
matrxtech@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> Mildred Pierce is a potboiler, but I found it
compulsively
> readable. There is so much going on, even if the
characters
> don't know what they are doing. On the quality of
writing:
> Cain wrote once that he loved the clich? because
his
> readers did. In this novel, it shows. Comparison
with Zola
> is very apt. I didn't like the movie.
>
There's
a good piece in the Summer 2003 issue of Bookforum on
Cain where
the author, Steve Erickson, talks about these matters.
I especially
like his opening anecdote, where Erickson refers to an
incident from
the youth of "one of the most literate magazine
editors in
the country":
"
... he was a high school senior taking a college-entrance
test
and part of
the exam was to write an essay about any great work of
American
literature. Afterward, when his English-teacher mother
asked which
novel he chose as the subject of his exegesis, he
answered
James M. Cain's *Mildred Pierce* -- and the blood ran
from
her face.
'You just failed,' she intoned. Of course she was
correct, he
did fail: He had chosen the wrong Cain. *Serenade*,
Cain's
berserk third novel published in 1937 -- now there would
have
been a
subject worthy of prolonged discussion."
Chris
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