When you find yourself searching your Kindle to find out how often an author uses the word ‘then’, then you know he’s lost you. I’d have accepted Mildred’s and Veda’s dodgy and unexplained rivalry and their easy-to-acquire wealth without much thought, had it not been for my struggles with the actual writing. I don’t know what Steinbeck was whining on about in The Grapes of Wrath – the Joads could have just borrowed some money and set up their own orange juice business.īut, in truth, neither of these was the real issue. Apparently the whole depressed world was just longing to go out and spend money on pie and other such essentials of life. They should just have gone to the bank and got a suitcase full of dosh and set up a small business. Was it really so easy for a rather stupid, completely inexperienced woman to get thousands of dollars of credit during the Depression even if she did bake good pies? If so, I wonder why so many people suffered. The fact that I found neither of them psychologically convincing was a major part of the problem, as was my extreme doubt over the unbelievable success of Mildred’s business ventures.
I, however, felt that I didn’t deserve either of them.
The best I could say about either of them is that they deserved each other. Having a mother as dull and tedious as Mildred couldn’t have been any fun though, especially since she veered from pathetic weakness to beating her child viciously. The only thing that makes Mildred remotely likeable is the fact that Veda is so horrible.
But I spent most of it wishing that a plague or asteroid would hit, wiping them all from the face of the earth. I stuck it out to the bitter end, and boy, was it bitter. Nope, couldn’t get on with this one at all. As Veda grows up, their relationship becomes increasingly fraught… However, this amazing success isn’t enough for her snobbish daughter who spends all the money while sneering at her mother’s method of earning it. Mind you, when I’m depressed, pie always helps, it’s true. So when Bert leaves/is thrown out, Mildred decides to make pies for a living and astonishingly this enables her to become incredibly rich despite the Depression. This is understandable, since the woman he has married, the eponymous Mildred, is not someone you’d really look to for sympathy or support, though on the upside she bakes good pie. When Bert Pierce loses everything in the Great Crash, he turns to another woman to soothe his bruised ego.
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