Shocking Rover Boy

THE MOTH (373 pp.)--James M. Cain --Knopf ($3).

In The 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 are the mark of Cain.

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 own.

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 whose hair curls to her shoulders, whose eyes are like something out of the sea, and who presents herself in Jack's guest room to show him her extensive tan.

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.

One of these moments occurs when, at 22, he first takes the hand of the twelve-year-old girl he loves. She loves him, too, and their hearts are faithful through years of separation brought on by evil gossipers and the threat of arrest for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

All of Mr. Cain's dream girls are screenable without a change of makeup; so is Jack Dillon. A star halfback and a trained engineer, he has "taffy" blond hair, dimples in his shoulders, and he displays that blend of brass and mechanical ingenuity that is required of a Cain hero, like an Eagle Scout who never heard of the gentler things a Scout is supposed to be. The best things in the book are like the best things in all Cain's books: clear, fast-moving narrative passages in which Jack Dillon tells you step by step how he bluffed, fought and figured his way out of jams.

Murder Paid For. In The Moth, James Cain is occasionally content to lead the reader by the hand rather than to belt him over the kidneys. This makes for a longer novel but not necessarily a better one. Cain's writing is too proficient and disciplined to be classed as pulp, too intelligent to be classed as trash, and some of it certainly ranks with the classics of shock fiction. It is nevertheless essentially near-adolescent. And as adolescence goes, The Moth is a more arrested case than The Postman, in which at least honest murder was done and paid for.

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