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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780679723219
ISBN number: 0679723218
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: May 14, 1989
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: May 14, 1989
Sale Popularity Level: 326412
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A classic novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Good writing and realism helped carry this novel a while for this reader. But I felt the lack of respect and compassion I had for all the characters tended to drag this novel down, and it became a bit of a chore to finish. No one it turns out had any morals or any brains. I wish I could've felt compassion for Mildred Pierce, but she stupidly enabled her bad seed daughter Veda every other page.
Rated by buyers 
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Required reading for all natives and denizens of Los Angeles. A dark romp thru our fair city. Accompany Mildred as she traverses LA's golden past- shop with her at Bullocks Wilshire, sweat bullets in the passenger seat as she navigates the Glendale freeway during the flood of 1938, pine for Pasadena, pray that her girls get into Marlborough, imagine singing at the Hollywood Bowl, and marvel as our heroine with the great gams builds an empire out of chicken and waffles - of all things! Mildred is no ordinary pie maker, she's Los Angeles incarnate. Joan Crawford may have won an Oscar for her portrayal in 1945, but Cain's 1941 novel more evenly balances Mildred's capacity for good against a city steeped in bad seeds. And while the film presents Mildred's daughter, Veda, as simply spoiled and shrill, Cain's study presents her as the fully fleshed out viper to which all true divas secretly aspire. Read it and weep. ~ Lili N. Barsha 5/2008
Rated by buyers 
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Mildred Pierce proves the old adage that love is blind. Mildred proves that with the men in her life, but even more so with her daughter. Mildred is like many people who can't see the faults in her child, and even when she does she squeezes her eyes even tighter shut. I found this book to be much more captivating than Cain's more popular The Postman Always Rings Twice. This book is timeless, and the characters as believable yesterday as the day they were driven.
Rated by buyers -
A man tends to his lawn, showers, gets dressed, tells his wife that he's going for a walk. She knows better --- he's going to see his mistress "and then unbutton that blue dress she's always wearing without any brassieres under it." But it's not the mistress that annoys her most. It's the way, in 1931, he's without work and not exactly looking for any.
So far, so ordinary.
Then the author steps in: "They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to cooled with spit. "
That's James M. Cain, folks, the master of the quick, dark truth.
When Cain wrote "Mildred Pierce," his fame and fortune were assured. In the 1930s, he had published "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Double Indemnity." These two short, brutal novels had scandalized the bluenoses and become bestsellers. He'd found a formula that, in a repressed culture, never fails --- serving up hot, illicit sex and then punishing the lovers.
In "Mildred Pierce," he adapted the formula and, in the process, wrote what I believe is his best novel. Here the shapely, sexy woman is a wife and mother who wants to stay married. She throws her husband out as a statement of self-respect. It's a costly gesture. As a friend says, "You've joined the biggest army on earth. You're the great American institution that never gets mentioned on Fourth of July --- a grass widow with two small children to support. The dirty bastards."
Mildred's assets are few. She can bake. And she's got a bod for sin. "Her brassiere ballooned a little, with an extremely seductive burden." Although she's got great gams, she feels she's slightly bow-legged, so she takes short steps when she walks. To great effect --- "her bottom twitched in a wholly provocative way."
It's not long before two realities collide. She has no trouble finding a lover (and discovering that she enjoys sex) --- but it's impossible to get a job. For one thing, she is without qualifications. For another, she fears that her eldest daughter, the beautiful and haughty Veda, will scorn her if she wears a waitress's uniform or becomes a clerk in a store.
But a waitress she becomes. And money flows in. Veda is, as expected, horrified. She says Mildred has "degraded" the family. Mildred's response: She spanks Veda silly. To no point. Veda crawls to a couch, laughs and whispers: "A waitress."
It is then that Mildred realizes that she fears her daughter's judgment, "her snobbery, her contempt, her unbreakable spirit." She resolves to open a restaurant, to be a waitress no more. And she thanks her daughter for prodding her to aim higher: "We'll have something. And it'll all be on account of you. Every good thing that happens is on account of you, if Mother only had the good sense to know it."
On the eve of the opening of Mildred's restaurant, she spends the weekend with a society swell and becomes his lover. Back home, her younger daughter has spiked a fever and is in the hospital. The death scene is terrible. Even worse is Mildred's reaction: Thank God it wasn't Veda.
Death and birth collide: As she buries her child, Mildred opens her restaurant. It's a great success. But we have half a book to go, and this half is a slow-mo train wreck --- the story of Veda's evil ways, her schemes to escape her mother and Mildred's shameless effort to win her love.
You think your kids have foul, disrespectful mouths? Listen to Veda: "With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls."
Through it all, Mildred is Mother Courage. Her will and her work ethic dazzle. But can Veda be redeemed?
In the movie --- directed by Michael ("Casablanca") Curtiz and starring Joan Crawford, her shoulders so padded she could be a linebacker --- the story is changed for greater dramatic effect. In the book, there's no need; this time, the female is punished and punished and punished, though she's done nothing to deserve it.
"Mildred Pierce" is twice as long as "Postman" and "Double Indemnity" --- and, say I, twice as satisfying. Face it, you're not likely to take a married lover and then kill his/her spouse. But most parents have, at one time or another, a child whose ingratitude is sharper than a serpent's tooth. Well, here's the worst case --- read it and weep for Mildred, then count your blessings.
Rated by buyers -
I was inspired to read Mildred Pierce after hearing Wesltey Strick, screenwriter and novelists, discuss his new novel on Elvis Mitchell's NPR radio show "The Treatment." Strick said to get in the mood for his own writing, he reread Mildred Pierce and I was intrigued. I had read some other Cain novels and knew he was a master of terse crime fiction but I wasn't prepared for the psychological insight and complexity evident here. His descriptions of American gaucherie and philistinism are unparalleled. His complexity between the mother and daughter is unforced.
The plot, about a Billy Goat husband who leaves his pretty wife for a trashy woman in Southern California circa the Depression, begins simply enough, but spins into penetrating psychological pathology.
His ability to capture America's sense of the American Dream and bad taste reminds me of Paula Fox's novella Desperate Characters and a masterful essay by William E. Blundell's "My Florida," published in the 2005 edition of The Best American Travel Writing.
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