Reviews on The Paris Wife
The Observer - review
Paula McLain's novel gives Ernest Hemingway's Paris years an affectingly romantic cast
A few years back, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld had the bright idea of fictionalising the life of Laura Bush. American Wife told the story of one Alice Blackwell, the gentle, liberal first lady of a wealthy, vulgar and dim-witted president. It was a clever side long way of peeking into the Bush administration, and prefigured both the name and modus operandi of The Paris Wife, a novelisation of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage from the point of view of his quiet and good-tempered spouse.
Like George Bush, Hemingway has over the years degenerated into a crude caricature of himself: "Papa", the drink-sodden bully who roamed the world with a shotgun in one hand and a whiskey in the other. By returning to the heady Paris interlude that began his career, Paula McLain retrieves a more appealing figure: a suitable romantic hero, in fact, for what turns out to be a pleasantly affecting love story.
Hadley Richardson (McLain has elected to keep her characters' real names) is 28 when she first meets the glamorous young war hero at a party. Wholesome, a little old-fashioned – "I don't know any jazz, so I'm playing Rachmaninoff" – she's resigned to a spinsterish existence, living unmarried and unemployed in the upper floor of her sister's house. Despite the cobwebs she is, as Ernest quickly spots, "a good clear sort", and so he marries her and whisks her from St Louis to the whirlwind of 1920s Paris, where the likes of Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein can be found thronging every boulevard.
The period and setting are hardly untrodden territory for novelists and biographers alike, and McLain owes a great debt, as she cheerfully admits, to A Moveable Feast ,Hemingway's own post humously published memoir of his Paris years. The difference between the two is that the action here is largely seen through Hadley's eyes; the domestic takes precedent and there is more emotion and exposition than Papa would permit.
Even stripped to the core, the story possesses a classically tragic arc, and it's not hard to see its appeal to a novelist bent on refleshing bare bones. Ernest and Hadley – Tatie, as they call each other – begin their expat life in a flush of love. He writes, she cooks, and they drink away the evenings "until we were beautifully blurred and happy to be there together". The first ripple of disharmony comes when Hadley decides to bring all Ernest's manuscripts – three years of work, copies included – with her in a valise to a rendezvous in Switzerland. Of course the case is lost, and the disaster exposes a fault line between the pair that's only further strained when Hadley discovers she's pregnant.
Full of mistrust after these inadvertent betrayals, Ernest is ripe for the seductive advances of Pauline Pfeiffer, a "pretty otter" of a woman who will eventually become Mrs Hemingway number two. McLain, who has done an excellent job of assuring the reader of Hadley's saintly qualities, clearly doesn't have much time for this snake in Dior, who accompanies the Hemingways on holiday on the proviso that she takes the afternoon shift in the marital bed.
Hadley is a deeply touching character, dignified even as she loses almost everything she's loved, and making her goodness both convincing and interesting is an impressive feat. Indeed, this book is a more risky affair than its sometimes sugary surface betrays. Taking up the Hemingway story inevitably means comparisons with Papa himself, and McLain courageously draws fire by including interludes written from his perspective: hard-bitten monologues with such lines as "You might as well bring yourself down and make yourself stinking sick with all you do because this is the only world there is." It's not exactly up there with John Cheever's classic parody, but it certainly does the job.
An appealing companion volume to A Moveable Feast, then, but once it's finished, turn back to the original, with its cool, impressionistic prose. It can hardly be said that the least interesting thing about Hemingway is the way he lived his life, but let's not forget that it's his writing that endures.
The New York Times - review
A First Wife Can Be So Stolid and Clueless and Plain and Pregnant
By JANET MASLIN
The strikingly attractive cover of “The Paris Wife” depicts a glamorous, poised-looking woman perched in a Paris cafe. She wears a belted, tailored dress reminiscent of the late 1940s or early 1950s. Her face cannot be seen, but her posture radiates confidence and freedom. The picture is interesting because it has absolutely nothing to do with the book it is selling.
The heroine of “The Paris Wife” is Hadley Richardson, the athletic, sturdily built, admittedly unfashionable homebody who married Ernest Hemingway in 1921. They were divorced in 1927. Hadley was, by all accounts including this one, a very fine and decent person, but she was the starter wife of a man who wound up treating her terribly. Had she not married him, no novelist would be telling her story.
But Paula McLain has built “The Paris Wife” around Hadley. Or at least she has planted Hadley in the midst of a lot of famous, ambitious people. The advantage to this technique is that it allows the reader to rub shoulders and bend elbows with celebrated literary types: the stay-at-home way of feeling like the soigné figure on the book cover. The drawback is that Ms. McLain’s Hadley, when not in big-league company that overshadows her, isn’t a subtly drawn character. She’s thick, and not just in physique. She’s slow on the uptake, and she can be a stodgy bore.
“Why couldn’t I be happy?” she asks herself at the start of the novel. “And just what was happiness anyway?” She has just met the younger Hemingway at a party in Chicago in 1920; she herself wasn’t all that young during their courtship. “I was 29, feeling almost obsolete, but Ernest was 21 and white hot with life,” she confides. “What was I thinking?” (Come on. We know what she was thinking.) And: “He was a light-footed lad on a Grecian urn chasing truth and beauty. Where did I fit in exactly?”
“The Paris Wife” raises fewer questions about Hadley’s thinking than it does about Ms. McLain’s. This novel draws heavily on research, but it does so in confounding ways. When Hadley describes writing a letter to her sweetheart, for instance, is the book paraphrasing a real letter? Let’s hope so, because if not, she is just being dull. “I made my reply last all day, putting things down as they happened,” Hadley says, “wanting to be sure he could picture me moving from room to room, practicing the piano, sitting down to a perfect cup of ginger tea with my friend Alice Hunt, watching our gardener prune the rosebushes and swaddle them in burlap for winter.”
Hadley’s real voice, at least as quoted in Hemingway’s Paris memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” isn’t dissimilar to Ms. McLain’s version. But in the context of his writing she sounds much livelier. Historically, Hemingway used his first wife as a sounding board as he framed his own ideas. He also invoked her with wit, selectivity and care.
The first third of the “The Paris Wife” is its most cliché-ridden. (“Did you ever think it could be like this?” “I can do anything if I have you with me.”) And it moves ploddingly. (“Grace had me pinned in the parlor, talking about the superiority of European lace, while Dr. Hemingway hovered with a plate of cheeses and beets he’d preserved himself, from his garden in Walloon Lake.”) For the reader’s purposes, these two can’t get to Paris fast enough. They go there from Chicago after the playwright Sherwood Anderson recommends the change of scenery. “Everything’s interesting and everyone has something to contribute,” he says. “Paris, Hem. Give it some thought.”
Once the couple gets to Paris, the book’s real name dropping begins. Along come Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. And their great works become topics of stilted banter. Here is Ms. McLain’s version of lifelike chat: “ ‘Everyone says “Ulysses” is great,’ Ernest said. ‘I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.’ ” As for Hadley, she doesn’t add much to these conversations, but she replays them for the reader. And she is very polite: “I spooned up my delicious soup as quietly as a mouse.” “The Paris Wife” turns into a bizarre pastiche when Ms. McLain begins borrowing and repurposing familiar voices. Hadley walks by the Île St.-Louis, goes down to the Seine, watches the fishermen and eats fried goujon — just as Hemingway did in his essay “People of the Seine.” Zelda Fitzgerald paraphrases Daisy Buchanan’s dialogue from “The Great Gatsby.” The noisy, real-life models for characters in “The Sun Also Rises” suddenly drop into the story en masse. And Hadley learns to talk more like her husband. She begins using simple declarative sentences. In the end he says Hadley is “everything good and straight and fine and true.” She says he is “fine and strong and weak and cruel.”
Throughout the book Ms. McLain relies on clumsy foreshadowing, to the point where Hadley can spy a “delicious-looking” baby, then find out on the very next page that she is pregnant. Once the Hemingways’ son is born Hadley’s situation rapidly becomes untenable. Hard-partying bohemian expatriates don’t much like babies. And they don’t like fidelity either. After Hadley makes the dreadful gaffe of losing the valise that held all of Hemingway’s early work, the great man thinks he has an excuse to be angry. His mind and body begin to wander.
At this point Pauline Pfeiffer worms her way into the novel so boldly that even Hadley senses trouble. Pauline, who is as chic as Hadley is frumpy, makes herself an instant fixture in the Hemingway household. She wildly flatters Hemingway about his writing. She gives Hadley the alarming pet name “Dulla,” and then insists on becoming Hadley’s closest chum. She borrows Hadley’s slippers, merrily saying, “You won’t be able to pry them off me.” In a feat of world-class back stabbing she crusades secretly to become Hemingway’s next wife (the second of four).
Was this changing of the guard an end for Hemingway? Or was it a new beginning? Get ready for abundant debate on issues raised by “The Paris Wife,” because what it lacks in style is made up for in staying power. This is a work of literary tourism that expertly flatters its reader. It invokes an artist-packed Paris where “nearly anyone might feel like a painter.” It keeps Hadley so trusting and good-hearted that it’s impossible for the reader not to spot trouble, i.e., get smart before she does. And it heats up a blaze of righteous indignation on her behalf.
Oh, Hadley, you could have been such a fine helpmate to that man if he hadn’t been such a louse. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
The Telegraph - review
David Robson relishes Paula McLain's pared-down recounting of Ernest Hemingway in France
He was boastful. He drank like a fish. He traded in his wives as soon as he got bored with them. And he hero-worshipped men who killed bulls for a living. The big difficulty Paula McLain faces in her novel based on the life of Ernest Hemingway is that even fans of the immortal Papa are likely to end up thinking less of the man.
The novel is set in the Twenties, when Hemingway was forging his reputation as a novelist, and is narrated by Hadley Richardson – the “Paris wife” of the title. She was born in St Louis, Missouri, and had a sheltered childhood. Her marriage to Hemingway, an impoverished journalist eight years her junior, came as a surprise to her friends; but it was certainly a love match, at least to begin with. Soon after the wedding, the couple moved to Paris, the epicentre of the literary and cultural world.
It was a giddy time and, as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford flit across the stage, McLain has a lot of fun with her star-studded cast. When the hard-drinking Hemingways meet Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at a nightclub, it is not a contest. “I don’t like a man who can’t take his liquor,” says Hemingway, as a queasy-looking Scott Fitzgerald has to be helped into a taxi.
If Paris is one long party, with Hemingway trying to establish himself as a writer but making painfully slow progress, the annual jaunts to Pamplona and the bull-running are even more hedonistic: a heady cocktail of hard drinking, middle-class adultery and bloody showdowns in the corrida.
Enter, with disastrous consequences, the treacherous Pauline. The Hemingways now have a son, Bumby, but the wheels are coming off their marriage. The final part of the book, with the novelist conducting a very public affair with his mistress and chiding his wife for not being more understanding, make painful reading.
Much of the raw material in The Paris Wife will be familiar to Hemingway fans from The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, and A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoir of Paris in the Twenties. But McLain’s beautifully imagined novel is a worthy addition to the Hemingway canon. It is sharp, unsparing and delivered in a pared-down prose that the great man himself would have applauded.
More Book Reviews
McLain's novel not only gives Hadley a voice, but one that seems authentic and admirable.... A certain amount of bravery is required in writing a novel that channels a giant of American literature. Yet McLain pulls it off convincingly, conveying Hemingway's interior life and his profound struggles. She makes a compelling case that Hadley was a crucial (and long-lasting) influence on Hemingway's writing life: a partner as well as a cheerleader. She also revisits, with remarkable detail, a singular era in history, one that would produce some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.
--Newsday
Novelist and memoirist Paula McLain traces the life of Hadley Hemingway, first wife of Ernest Hemingway, in this evocative novel set largely in Paris in the Jazz Age.
--Christian Science Monitor
Written much in the style of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank ... Paula McLain's fictional account of Hemingway's first marriage beautifully captures the sense of despair and faint hope that pervaded the era and their marriage.
--Associated Press
Engrossing and heartbreaking.... McLain is masterful at mining Hadley's confusion and pain, her crushing realization that she cannot fight for a love that has already disappeared.
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
McLain smartly explores Hadley's ambivalence about her role as supportive wife to a budding genius.... Women and book groups are going to eat up this novel.
--USA Today
By making the ordinary come to life, McLain has written a beautiful portrait of being in Paris in the glittering 1920s—as a wife and one's own woman.... McLain's vivid, clear-voiced novel is a conjecture, an act of imaginary autobiography on the part of the author. Yet her biographical and geographical research is so deep, and her empathy for the real Hadley Richardson so forthright (without being intrusively femme partisan), that the account reads as very real indeed.
--Entertainment Weely
Told in the voice of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, is a richly imagined portrait of bohemian 1920s Paris, and of America literature’s original bad boy.
--Town & Country
Written much in the style of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank ... Paula McLain's fictional account of Hemingway's first marriage beautifully captures the sense of despair and faint hope that pervaded the era and their marriage.
--Elle
McLain offers a vivid addition to the complex-woman-behind-the-legendary- man genre, bringing Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to life.... The heart of the story—Ernest and Hadley's relationship—gets an honest reckoning, most notably the waves of elation and despair that pull them apart.
--Publishers Weekly
Though eventually a woman scorned, Hadley is able to acknowledge without rancor or bitterness that "Hem" had "helped me to see what I really was and what I could do." Much more than a woman-behind-the-man homage, this beautifully crafted tale is an unsentimental tribute to a woman who acted with grace and strength as her marriage crumbled. —Margaret Flanagan
--Booklist