Word: caine
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...since boyhood, his wife is the only woman who will stand by him, and there is not one employer in Grand Republic who will defy the outraged city fathers by giving him a steady job. Only in the last, melodramatic chapter-which reads like a climax by James M. Cain-does Author Lewis feel the need to range a couple of whites at Neil's side, when he is almost lynched by a horde of furious Babbitts, armed with shotguns...
...which he held till the party told him to become a Partisan. Today, at 37, he lives like a petty bourgeois in a one-room apartment, is interested in the film-producing business, loves Dante's Divine Comedy, especially Canto V ("Love led us down to death together: Cain awaits the soul of him who laid us dead...
...Author Cain's introduction is so spirited that readers are likely to start his new novel with respect and sympathy. Unfortunately, they will find that The Butterfly, despite its air of dealing frankly with the delicate and ancient Oedipus theme, is about as incestuous as Tarzan of the Apes...
Like Sophocles' King Oedipus, who marries his own mother without knowing who she is, Cain's Jess Tyler bumps into his handsome daughter, Kady, without recognizing her, after 20 years' separation. When he does find out, he does his best to keep away from...
...rather than disappoint his readers, Author Cain does some thimblerigging with family birthmarks, and soon fixes things so that Kady is not Jess's daughter after all, and they may step out together hand in hand to enjoy more commonplace sins of Cain, such as adultery, bigamy, perjury, moonshining, arson, mayhem and murder. "She was anybody's woman," mutters Jess gloomily-after he has neatly exploded Kady's real father with a large charge of dynamite, and she has run away with a more tolerant sort...