The Paris Wife--My Thoughts

I finished The Paris Wife by Paula McLain on Tuesday night.  I read the whole in the a matter of four days, which lets you know how much I just could not put it down!

The basic premise is that this is a novelization of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley Richardson, his first wife--often referred to as his Paris Wife--from her point of view.  It follows from their meeting in Chicago to the end of their marriage at the hands of Hemingway's second wife, with brief interludes from his perspective that help to flesh out the story because Hadley obviously could not know everything that was going on in his mind.

I knew the basic gist of what was going to happen from research I've done on that part of Hemingway's life and from his books--specifically The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast.  As a result, it was a lot of fun to be able to pick out bits of his novels as I read--to be able to see the story within the story.

I think that this was a fantastic approach to writing a very interesting story.  Oftentimes Hadley is kind of skipped over by biographers, but without her support, Hemingway probably wouldn't have been Hemingway.  I am really glad that McLain included a brief bibliography at the end of the story.  It helped convince me that she had done her research and wasn't just making up stuff.  Obviously, she had to take a little license because she was trying to make a novel out of actual events, to turn actual people into characters by ascribing thought processes to them, to create dialog.  The correspondence of Hemingway and Hadley and their associates turned out to be an invaluable tool in the writing of this novel.  I saw some lines of dialog that I know were taken from letters that I had read as a part of my own research, which I thought was a very good and interesting technique (device? method?).

I knew what was going to happen before I read.  I knew who they were going to meet and then have a falling out with.  I knew where they were going to travel.  I knew what their travels would mean to Hemingway's early writing.  I knew what and who was going to cause the breakup of the marriage.  But I still could not stop reading, which is a testament to McLain's writing ability.  I loved being able to get inside of Hadley's head and see things from her perspective.  I loved that I got more detail about these events than I previously had--namely about their time in Antibes and Hadley's trip in the Loire Valley.  I didn't know the sordid details about how the end of their marriage came about.  Let me just say--it was messed up.

This book made me crave Hemingway's work in ways I had not felt before reading this novel.  OK...he's my favorite author and I want to read all of his work, but I hadn't just wanted to devour every little scrap that he wrote with quite this intensity.  Like, I want to read it all five minutes ago.  It spurred me to go ahead and buy the other volumes in Michael Reynolds's Hemingway biography.  Basically, this work really jumpstarted my reading, which is sorely needed.

I would recommend this novel to Hemingway fans and people who want to get into Hemingway.  I think it provides either a new perspective or a good introduction, depending on where you are.