Kerry-Lynn's pick: Paula McLain, The Paris Wife (Bond Street Books, 2011).
Discussed: 9 June 2011 @ Ensemble (850 Thurlow Street, Vancouver)
I have decided to holler into the wilderness again, after a busy year during which I had no time or desire to spend my free time on a computer. But I miss cataloguing my reads - a year of fabulous reading has slipped from my brain. So without further ado, I'm back on track with The Paris Wife, though not necessarily with a bang. I applaud Kerry-Lynn for picking out new, untested fiction for book club while I gravitate toward literature with a pedigree, and in this case the literary premise was promising: a fictionalized account of the marriage of Ernest Hemingway to his first wife, Hadley, set largely in the Paris of the early 1920s. Their love was pure and intense, but sorely tested in a social world in which conventional marriage was an exoticism.
So why was the book so unfulfilling? Part of the problem was that I found the second half of the novel, in which Ernest and Hadley's marriage was failing, much more convincing than the happy first half. This is partly because it is made clear from the beginning that everything will end in tears. It is partly because Hadley's narrative voice seems fuzzy - the book is in the past tense, but is she recounting her story as an old lady? Or is narrator Hadley speaking from the perspective of now, from beyond the grave? I don't know, but McLain paints the historical backdrop in broad strokes, and the effect is impersonal and textbooky. (Would a contemporary American in Paris, especially a poor and unfashionable one, really cite Coco Chanel as the defining face of the age?)
All this is a fancy way of saying that I found the novel, or at least the first half, a little boring. I was, however, haunted by the account of open/hidden infidelity that cut Hadley so viciously. Her "good girl" persona becomes marginally more interesting when it survives the casual cruelties of Ernest and his lover Pauline. Even here, however, the story was all-too-familiar, and I found myself annoyed at having to rehash this perennial tale of woe.
