Mildred Pierce (1941)

You could fit both of James Cain's first two novels inside of this one, and still have room left over for a good chunk of his third. It's a funny thing when a writer's work starts feeling expansive when a novel comes in at 300 pages, but that's the thing about Cain. With the preternatural compression and determined hard-nosed flint of those first two, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Cain went to supernatural lengths to remove the inessential. He's still pretty hardcore hard-boiled here in his fourth, but as the title alone would seem to indicate, this is more a self-conscious attempt at a "woman's story"—sardonic parody, straight-up melodrama, or otherwise—and so even though there's enough mayhem and cruelty to satisfy any aficionado of crime fiction, there are shades and nuance of emotion and a parade of sticky relationships as well. Those things require time and space to develop, hence the comparative War and Peace scope. I was familiar first with the classic Joan Crawford vehicle directed by Michael Curtiz. But I see now that typically enough a lot of blunting and elision was required to get the story whittled down to a two-hour feature (unlike the productions based on Cain's first two, which are practically straight lifts). (I am looking forward, let me add quickly, to the Mildred Pierce mini-series scheduled to arrive late next month on HBO, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet, which I think from its scope has a better chance of successfully hewing closer to the novel.) I was surprised at Cain's ability here to strike a relaxed tone and let events unspool more deliberately, as the complications ripen naturally. The Crawford movie is starkly black and white in more ways than one; I recall the central relationship between Mildred Pierce and her daughter as fairly clearly defined. One is bad and one is not. While much of that dynamic comes from the novel, the situation in toto is infinitely more complex, even starting with its surprising grasp of the difficulties confronting women who need to earn a living and want to be successful about it, particularly in those times. Cain's voice here reminds me more of hale and hearty American bonhomie, more Sinclair Lewis than Dashiell Hammett—though, to be sure, Cain as always remains an original. The shift in tone suits the material better, setting up the gut punches more effectively rather than telegraphing and continually attempting to top them. In his first two novels Cain delivers a gnawing sense of doom from the first sentences forward. Here, he dresses up that sense of doom inside pretty wrapping paper of ordinary American lives, simple hopes, and the bravado of cheer. Open the package, it's still pretty dark in there.

In case it's not at the library.