A Novel of Hemingway’s First Marriage

By Brenda Wineapple
Sunday Book Reviews, New York Times, March 20, 2011

THE PARIS WIFE

By Paula McLain
320 pp. Ballantine Books. $25.

Left - Ernest Hemingway and Hadley in 1922.

Hemingway Collection/JFK Library, via Associated Press

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 McLain’s stylish new novel. Narrated largely from Hadley’s 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 McClain’s 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.

Full review at New York Times.