There was no doubt that here, on the cheap, Ernest was able to make Paris his informal university. Hadley’s impressions of the city - dirty, war-shocked, tawdry and raw - stand out against Ernest’s instantaneous delight, though in time she came to appreciate “the oddity and the splendor.” If the novel’s beginning sections stumble over a few expository bumps (Hadley: “What do you mean to do?” Ernest: “Make literary history, I guess.”), the narrative finds its flow a few months after the couple’s wedding, when they make their way to Paris. McLain is right to underscore it, along with Hadley’s abundant sympathy for his suffering, with compassionate sensitivity.Įrnest and Hadley were down when they met, but they weren’t out.
This early brush with death had a profound influence on much of Hemingway’s future behavior and on all the fiction he wrote. She had also mourned the deaths of a beloved older sister and her mother.Įrnest, who had been seriously wounded in Italy during the Great War while a teenager, was suffering from the shaking nightmares and depression that today we call post-traumatic stress disorder and was then known as shell shock. Louis home when she was 13, a grim foreshadowing of Ernest’s father’s suicide and, decades later, Ernest’s own. Hadley’s father had killed himself in their St. It’s an imaginative homage to Hadley Richardson Hemingway, whose quiet support helped her young husband become a writer, and it gives readers a chance to see the person Hemingway aspired to be before fame turned him into something else.īuilding her fictional but scrupulously true-to-life narration around many source materials, including two full-length biographies of Hadley as well as Hemingway’s posthumous memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” McLain begins by dramatizing how damaged Ernest and Hadley were by the time they met in Chicago in 1920. And “The Paris Wife” is a more ambitious effort than just a Hallmark version of Americans in Paris.
What they call cliches are simply conventions that all historical novels share, including Nancy Horan’s “Loving Frank,” the acclaimed best seller that McLain’s book superficially resembles. “The Paris Wife” is a richer and more provocative book than many reviewers have acknowledged. So who’s right: enthusiastic book-buying audiences or unsympathetic critics? The Los Angeles Times called the book “a Hallmark version” of Hemingway’s Paris years, hampered by “pedestrian writing and overpowering sentiment.” The New York Times concurred, calling Hemingway’s wife Hadley “a stodgy bore” and McLain’s prose cliche-ridden and plodding. Paula McLain’s historical novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage has been climbing up the best-seller lists as steadily as reviewers have been dismissing it.
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