The Paris Wife

Fiction based on real figures in history is a fraught field. Hilary Mantel pulled it off with Wolf Hall, told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, an adviser to England's King Henry VIII.

Success hinges not just on quality of research but also the writer's ability to bring characters to life.

McLain takes on an ambitious project: little- known Hadley Richardson, first wife of Ernest

Hemingway, the early 20th-century American writer of classics such as The Sun Also Rises, not to mention war hero and Great White Hunter of beasts and beauty (four wives, numerous lovers).

Hadley who? You well might ask.




The genial, apple-cheeked St Louis native faded into obscurity in the United States after divorcing the handsome, temperamental Hemingway in 1927, after five years of marriage in often financially strapped circumstances during which she bore him a son.

Luckily, Hadley and Hemingway will always have Paris - a setting that is a gift for any writer, as is the Gatsby-ish whirl of the Jazz Age and the bohemian expatriate milieu of literary friends such as Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.

Hence the title, The Paris Wife, evoking Hemingway's enduring association with the City of Light's so-called 'Lost Generation' of the 1920s.

The novel is mostly told in the first person of Hadley's gentle, almost irritatingly naive voice, starting from childhood and the shotgun suicide of her father, through to falling in love and married life in Gay Paree.

Oddly, though, five chapters in italics pop up in third-person flashbacks in Hemingway's voice.

As a device, it helps explain the motivation of other characters but it fails as a convincing characterisation of the gung-ho Hemingway himself.

An introverted and earnest Ernest, puzzling over what women really want? Him, of course.

McLain's craftwork occasionally falters when handling the historical setting, too.

This sentence - 'The year before, Olive Thomas had starred in The Flapper and the word suddenly meant jazz and moved like it too' - is plonked in a passage where Hadley worries about being older than Hemingway. The effect is contrived.

Still, while McLain does not manage to do a Mantel, her endearingly besotted, newly sensuous Hadley is an antidote to all the Hemingway macho bullfighting schtick.

And the presence of a surprisingly vulnerable Hemingway certainly makes for a myth-busting perspective.

More: The Paris Wife: A Novel