Ernest Hemingway is a writer steeped in both history and mystery. A fascinating character, one whose mythos extends 50 years past his suicide death. The Paris Wife is not about Hemingway, per se. It is about his first wife Hadley Richardson, a woman who he was wed to for 5 years and had one son, called Bumby. It is a somewhat fictionalized account of their marriage (the details are real, but who knows about the private conversations or how Hemingway was feeling and thinking?) and life in Paris in Hemingway's early writing years.
McLain paints "Hem" (and from what has been written about him before, probably very accurately) as a self-centered, drunken jerk, very impressed with "Hemingway" as a personality rather than invested in himself as a person, husband, father or friend. He was extremely macho and obsessed with Spanish bullfighting (read The Sun Also Rises, for more information on that!). He was not unloving, and seemed to believe that Hadley was his true love- that is until Paulette came along and befriended Hadley to get close to Hem and begin an affair with him.
Hadley is not drawn as a feminist, or as the time period might have suggested, a suffragette. She was a simple person, musically gifted, loving and unfussy. This was probably the best kind of mate Hemingway might have had, someone to balance his dark moods and drinking, except that she often took to drinking to maintain her relationship with Hemingway herself.
One of the most fascinating things about this story is the depiction of relationships between Hem and Hadley and the 1920's Paris expat literary glitterati, including Gertrude Stein (of course, not without Alice B. Toklas), Archibald McLeish and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reading about these real writers as people casually throwing out statements about trying to get published, "It's called The Great Gatsby...and this Gatsby fellow is still with me" is quite thrilling for someone who enjoys classic literature. Of course, Fitzgerald, like Hemingway, was a drunk and his bad behavior outdid even Hem's.
The story is fascinating on its own, even without the name-dropping, and at it's heart a true depiction of a flawed and co-dependent marriage. It was refreshing to find that Hadley did eventually find love, of the stable and kind variety after Hemingway. But McLain does a terrific job of writing two people truly in love who have no idea how to form a marriage, especially since one of them is a flawed, creative type of person who is only in his early 20's and appears to have PTSD from his experiences in Italy during WWI. One could assume their marriage was doomed from the start, but while Hadley describes them as continually "naive", there is an element of hope from both Hemingway and Hadley, and they did seem to want to truly make it work, at least for a while.
I would recommend this book to all readers, but especially to those who are fans of the classics.
