Sunday Book Review

The Paris Wife

By BRENDA WINEAPPLE Published: March 18, 2011

No one ever accused Ernest Hemingway of creating memorable women characters except perhaps in his posthumously published Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, where he idealizes his first wife, Hadley Richardson, as the alter ego who shared with him the good old days before fame and fortune and another woman wrecked it all. Hadley Richardson now comes into her own, sort of, as the long-suffering wife in Paula McLains stylish new novel. Narrated largely from Hadleys point of view, The Paris Wife smoothly chronicles her five-year marriage to the novelist, most of which was spent in Paris among aspiring writers when, as McClains Hadley recalls, we were beautifully blurred and happy. This is her own movable feast: Paris was fresh, the wine was flowing and there was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow. Though initially disgusted by the expatriate community, which, as the fictional Hadley remembers, preened and talked rot and drank themselves sick, Hemingway was ineluctably drawn into its orbit and then into the orbit of the rich, who had better days and freer nights. They brought the sun with them and made the tides move. No one does this better than chic Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy Midwesterner who works for Vogue, wears a coat made of hundreds of chipmunk skins sewn painfully together and sets her cap for Ernest. Keep watch for the girl who will come along and ruin everything, Hadley warns herself, after the fact. Theres a certain inevitability, then, about what happens in The Paris Wife. Based on letters and biographies, and on Hemingways own ample recollections of Paris, the novel proceeds by the book all the books, in fact, about Paris in the 1920s, including those by Hemingway and thus bumps against the usual expatriate suspects, like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, who, as Hadley almost apologetically explains, were or would soon become giants in the field of arts and letters, but we werent aware of this at the time.

A Moveable Feast
By CHARLES POORE Published: May 5, 1964

The importance of beating Ernest, someone once said, gave a hopeless target to industrious lit'ry careerists. How cheerfully Hemingway was aware of that--and how early--appears quite clearly in this memoir of what I can only call his brilliantly obscure emergence as a man of letters. Here is Hemingway at his best. No one has ever written about Paris in the nineteen twenties as well as Hemingway. Thousands, of course, have given their own bright versions of that unaccountably perpetual springtime, but too many lost parts of their own identities in taking on some of Hemingway's. And they could not precisely share his astounding fugue of interests, which wove Tolstoy out of Sylvia Beach's bookship with days at the great race tracks, skiing expeditions to the Alps and the study of Czanne, noticing that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wearing a British Guardsman's tie and boxing with Ezra Pound, forays to Pamplona and living above a sawmill at 113 Rue Notre Dame des Champs. It made a very Movable Feast. The feasting was sometimes pretty Spartan. Yet Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their infant son, lived high on low amounts of money.