It's not often that a novella or short story packs the emotional punch of a complete novel, but in the case of The Postman Always Rings Twice, James Cain has done just that. Postman is an exceptional work.
To begin, Cain gets the language of his characters just right: their dialogue is realistic, their diction accurate. He doesn't reach for too much, and he certainly doesn't intrude with unnecessary narration. Dialogue carries Postman: all the other scaffolding fades away.
But of course when Cain does interject -- when he describes place or time -- he achieves a superb balance: there's nothing extraneous here, there's nothing which diverts from the noir.
And this applies, I think, to the plot as well: Cain's constructed the perfect crime, and the perfect set of circumstances to frustrate it. Every turn has its opposite, every decision its counterpoint. Cain's characters, of course, cannot anticipate these, but they are revealed, it's a wonder they could have been missed.
There's something transcendent in Postman. This is how a novella should be: a self-contained universe, a glimpse into a world. Cain did not cast a wide net, and the result is a story, strangely, with universal appeal. In Cain's precision are themes which stretch across populations and geographies. This is a great work of literature. This is how stories should be told.
Cain strikes me as very American in his protagonists wanting to be, in the end, the nice guy. Yes, I killed the diner owner, but Hey, I'm repentant. Yes, I put my girlfriend in a way to be killed, but I feel bad about it. (I forget that novel--the guy sang opera.)
ReplyDeleteHe also wanted to tell you how things worked. I quit on Mildred Pierce because having learned how to run a diner I was apparently about to learn how to tend a soprano. Now, in fairness, he did have pages to fill, and Hardy was probably the last novelist who could give his audience twenty pages of heath without complaints.