I Still Don't Like Hemingway, But...

...if The Paris Wife is an accurate historical portrayal of his early literary life, then I feel like I can forgive some of his macho, sexist writing.

In case you lived under a literary rock for the last 12 months, The Paris Wife is the fictionalized story of Hadley Hemingway ne Richardson, who was Ernest Hemingway's first wife (out of four total).  Based on extensive research into the Hemingways' time in Paris, the novel starts in Chicago, where a young Hadley meets an even younger Ernest at a party.  Instantly drawn to each other, the two start an affair that eventually leads to marriage.  Despite the disapproval of both families, Ernest and Hadley set off for Paris, the happening scene for writers and artists in the very early 20th century.  Surrounded by such literary giants and Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, Ernest sets about the serious business of writing.  Hadley, left to her own devices most of the time, loses herself in his career.  Over time, their relationship cannot withstand the darkness in his own soul, or his affair with a young editor at Vogue.

I've managed to read one and a half Hemingway novels, and a few of his short stories.  The one I remember best is Hills Like White Elephants,  about a woman who wants to have a baby with her husband but he wants her to have an abortion so he doesn't have to change his rather selfish lifestyle.  Not exactly endearing.  I've always been put off by his very violent ideas about manhood, and his rather apparent disrespect for women.  Having read The Paris Wife, however, I am better able to put his ideas in not just a historical context, but a more personal, emotional one.

What I didn't know about him before reading this book was that he was injured in the first World War, and that he spent most of the rest of his life trying to stare down death, terrified by his own morality.  Constantly afraid of being seen as cowardly or weak, he actively sought out experiences, like the bullfights in Pamplona, to convince himself of his own strength.  His war experiences, coupled with his depressive nature and the history of mental illness in his family, suddenly I see his overly-macho definition of what it means to be a man in a new light.  And while I still don't like his fiction, and I still think that he was a philandering sexist, at least now I have a context to put it in.  I now have compassion where before was only contempt.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

The Road is one of those books that I knew I should get around to, but just never seemed to make its way into my reading rotation.  I knew that it was post-apocalyptic, which I enjoy.  I knew that McCarthy is a well-respected author, for good reason.   I was waiting to watch the movie until I read the book, and even that wasn't enough of a push.  Well, I finally got around to it, and now I know why I resisted.  I knew that the story was depressing as hell and it would suck me into its dark, ash-filled, cannibalistic world like a black hole sucks in light.

The story centers around a man and his son, wandering a world that is utterly dead.  While  this is obviously because of some man-made disaster, we never really learn what.  The man and his son have been wandering and scavenging for years, sometimes going days without finding anything to eat.  There are no animals, nothing grows-the earth is filled with ash and smoke and burned out cities.  They often have to hide from gangs of cannibals, looking for other survivors to hold captive and use as food.  Despite the apparent hopelessness of the situation, the man and his son keep traveling along the road, not really believing that things might be better on the coast, but unable to bow to the seeming inevitability of death. 

Here's the thing-despite the fact that at least once I was contemplating suicide on the characters' behalf, I loved this book.  The writing is genius.  I've never read any of McCarthy's books before, but if all of them have the same ability to convey with just a few words the enormity of life and love and death then I'll read them all.  I'm always in awe of authors who can choose exactly the right words to create a vivid picture for the reader-no more and no less.  Being rather verbose myself, I admire this ability.  I also admire the imagination that can come up with this kind of skewed reality in the first place.  Though it makes me wonder what kind of dark place McCarthy's mind is.

My one complaint-the ending.  Not that it is left completely open-ended.  I get that as a metaphor for life in general, and that as long as there is life the story is never over, everything is uncertain except for the passage of time, etc..In fact, my complaint is that the story should have ended about 10 pages sooner than it did, with the boy completely alone.  Now THAT would have been a head-scratcher, real food for thought, a book group discussion starter. Despite my feeling that he caved a little bit at the end, overall I am deeply affected by this book, and find myself thinking about it off and on in the days since I finished it.  What more can a book have to recommend it than that?