Thirty Six. Mildred Pierce (and selected stories) by James M. Cain
1936, Everyman’s Library, 107 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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Mildred Pierce, the third of the novels collected in the Everyman’s Library edition of James M. Cain’s books, stands in sharp contrast to the two other novels presented here, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Both of the former are pioneering works in the thriller canon, being some of the first being told from the perspective of the criminals and not their pursuers. Mildred Pierce’s connection to crime is incidental, if any. It’s a story of independence, of strength, and of triumph. The namesake of the story is a married woman in the early thirties, who decides to kick her husband out of the house after a public and unashamed affair — not a common decision in the times depicted in the novel — and to provide for her two daughters on her own. She does so by first becoming a waitress, and then opening her own restaurant, which then becomes a chain of restaurants, bringing her closer to the riches she envisages for her children, but never close enough to reach her ultimate dream — being worthy in the eyes of her eldest daughter.
Her eldest daughter, Veda, has grown up used to wealth and prestige due to her father’s success as a real estate entrepreneur who has lost his company and his savings in the depression, and as such has been the most affected by the dire changes her family is facing. Cain peels the layers off her personality slowly, eventually revealing her to be a sociopath who will never grant her mother the love and filial affection that she craves, and her lot in the novel is the closest to the description of crime in this novel.
Cain weaves in this, the most intricate and expansive of the three novels collected here, a tale of triumph and despair, a tragedy in the face of what should have been an epic saga of female success and power; of a woman who fights her entire life, but cannot rise above the level of what she’s most afraid of. And who, at the end of the novel, settles for what she had when she set out on her adventure — a reinstated husband, in the same boat as her, and not much else.
In addition to the three novels, the book also encompasses four of Cain’s short stories — all of which return to the element of crime — random, cruel, swift — against the backdrop of the aftermath of the American depression. In them, a husband releases a wild tiger into a house with his wife and infant child in a revenge plot gone wrong; the day of a temporary firefighter trying to fend off Californian brush fires starts as being acclaimed as a hero and ends in a tragic way; an incidental killer is chased across the Unites States by his guilt; and a drifter discovers that in the post-depression United States, trust is also in short supply.
