["Mildred Pierce"] has about three books worth of plot: financial ups and downs, everyone in bed with everyone else, six punchy trick endings one after another. Yet it has many good things. Cain makes no pretensions whatsoever to being a social novelist, but the scenes of Mildred looking for a job, Mildred waiting on table, and Mildred talking to the rich mother of the boy who got Veda into [James T.] Farrell's favorite condition, are bitter, incisive and unquestionably authentic. Cain's talent is the hare to Farrell's tortoise. He is a slick and accomplished writer, with a genius for effective, sparse dialogue and tight, neat plots with trick endings, preferably ringing twice. Like Farrell, he has been kidded out of the worst of his excesses,… but unlike Farrell he has now become readable.

And yet, for all of Farrell's weakness and Cain's competence, "Mildred Pierce" is essentially a...