A fictional inside view by the first wife of one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century.
Hadley Richardson is portrayed as a weak woman, indecisive, subservient to her effusive husband, a heavy drinker herself and an absentee mother who is relieved when her baby spends more time with the nanny; a woman without the guts to tear the eyeballs out of the wily opponent who steals her husband.
This is Paris in the 20's, filled with American expatriates who see their dollar go very far against the impoverished franc, who drink their days away to escape the horrors of the last war and to blind themselves to the inevitable coming of the next, a place where everyone is sleeping with everyone else, and where families and children are obstacles to the creation of great new art.
A time of self-induced routines: champagne breakfasts, sunning, swimming, bridge, cocktails and the annual pilgrimage to Pamplona where the running of the bulls herald death in the afternoon.
Some, like the Hemingways survive it, other like the Pounds require it, and yet others like the Fitzgeralds are consumed by it.
Hemingway dominates the book, as usual.
Convinced that he is destined for greatness in the literary field, he applies himself single-mindedly to his booze and his craft at the expense of family and friends.
He befriends literary greats such as Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson only to dump on them in his books.
He makes new friends by inviting them to box with him.
He craves the support and company of Hadley only to betray her with other women, finally sleeping with both his present wife and future wife, Pauline, in the same bed and asking the former what is wrong, and why can they not continue this arrangement, if but for the stimulation of his writing (and his libido).
There is also the love story of Ernest and Hadley, two souls sharing solitary childhoods, domineering mothers, and warm-hearted fathers who each committed suicide with a gun.
She is older than him, 28 to his 21, but then even with Pauline, Hemingway seemed to prefer older women (his third and fourth wives were younger; perhaps he was stuck in a "wife time warp").
The cracks in the relationship start to appear as Ernest's career takes off and Hadley's is stuck around keeping the home fires burning in their pokey Paris apartment and minding the inconvenient baby who seems to be in the way of his father's burgeoning greatness.
There is also the temptress Pauline, Hadley's best friend in Paris, who inveigles herself into the Hemingway household and slowly usurps the thrown.
Paula McLain has done a great job in evoking the period and these two ill-fated lovers, and rendering to us what could have been a very accurate picture of the young Hemingway and his Paris Wife that is not well represented in the biographies and autobiographies that proliferate around this couple.
I was left with several truisms: the pure artist is a self-centred person, almost psychotic; nothing gets between him, his art, and the fuel that he needs to deliver that art whether that be wine women or song.
Hemingway embodies all of this.
In addition, given his war wounds that left him in periods of extreme physical pain, he lived in constant fear of death and sought it out, confronting his mortality in the bull-fights, the big-game hunting, the deep-sea fishing and in trouble spots around the world that he visited, finally facing it down the barrel of his shotgun before tripping the trigger with his toe and leaving us only with his genius.
The artist consumed by his art.
As for Hadley, and let us not forget that this is her book, narrated from her POV, she outlives her younger husband, marrying again, a more sedentary marriage this time, and lives out the rest of her life in obscurity.
I'm not sure, given her innate weakness and better sense of balance, that she was capable of anything more.
And yet Hemingway reminisces towards the end of his days that Hadley was the great love of his life, not just the Paris Wife, but the best one.