Word: caine
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...MOTH (373 pp.)-James M. Cain -Knopf...
...Moth, Hollywood's hoary old sensation-monger James M. Cain tells the story of a nice boy-nice, that is, by comparison with other guys he has written about. Mr. Cain's new hero has a sense of beauty and even a sense of guilt. His missteps, including fraud, adultery, a few burglaries and one stickup, are practically forced upon him by the Great Depression. Thus Mr. Cain has it both-ways: his boy can be a college-educated, clean-cut young American and at the same time do the tough things in the tough situations that...
Hero Jack Dillon-like Author Cain a Baltimore Irishman-tells the story in the first person, a common practice in Cain's novels, which absolves the author from having to write in English. Cain's command of the I'm-telling-you-brother vernacular has been compared with Lardner and Hemingway, but it is neither as inventive as Lardner's nor as selective as Hemingway's. It often sounds like what it often is-something the movies picked up pure and handed back to Americans as if it had been their...
Manhood Regained. Instead of smelling out his mates and attacking them with bites, as Mr. Cain's earlier heroes did, Jack never once smells a girl; he responds to visual appeal. It is, in fact, at the point that he does not respond to it-when he has been riding the rails as a hobo for some months and a Petty girl strips and wiggles for him in a passing compartment -that he realizes he will have to do something (i.e., steal) to regain his manhood. The emotional crisis is at length resolved by an oilman's wife...
There have usually been hidden wells of sentiment in Mr. Cain's characters. Even in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Frank, though handy enough at murder with a wrench, sometimes thought about God while in swimming. The Moth gets its title from the fluttering blue-green Luna moth that Jack Dillon falls in love with as a little boy and ever after remembers at beautiful moments...