The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

In the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris, Ernest Hemingway talks in clichés as he tosses his lovely hair out of his eyes. In The Paris Wife Hemingway also speaks in clichés, but whereas in the movie you know it’s all a joke, in the book it’s supposed to be serious dialogue. The Paris Wife and Midnight in Paris have a lot in common; both describe Hemingway and his circle in Paris in the 1920’s through the eyes of outsiders. In the movie, the outsider is the time travelling writer Gil. In the book, it’s Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson.

Hadley Richardson was Hemingway’s starter wife and they divorced after seven years of marriage and one child. Hadley was frumpy and domestic and she married Hemingway when she almost 30 and he was only 21. They seem mismatched from the start though you do get the sense that Hemingway, fresh from WWI, needed nurturing and Hadley was a nurturer. The book covers Ernest and Hadley’s years together and ends when he leaves Hadley for wife #2 (with a short epilogue that tells us that Hadley later found happiness with a man who was far more reliable than Ernest). Even though this is a novel it apparently sticks closely to the facts and uses characters’ real names.

It’s the atmosphere that makes this book fun to read, in the same way that Midnight in Paris was fun to watch even though the premise was just dumb. I pictured all the characters in the book as they looked in the movie. Thus in my head Gertrude Stein looked like Kathy Bates, and the Fitzgeralds looked like those two lovely actors whose picture I’ve posted on my Pinterest board. Unfortunately there wasn’t complete overlap and the movie never shows Ernest with Hadley. Nevertheless I pictured her looking like Mariel Hemingway, whose real-life grandmother was Hadley Richardson.

(Book 32, 2011)

Nemesis by Philip Roth

Leah Hager Cohen, writing in the New York Times, says that she always thought Philip Roth’s books were “for boys.” Then she goes on to say how much she liked Nemesis. Why? It’s just as boy-centric as all the others. I managed to get through it only because I was interested in two things: the topic (polio), and the setting (the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, NJ in 1944, where my mother-in-law [and Philip Roth] grew up).

Roth’s alter ego, Bucky Cantor, is a young gym teacher and playground director. At the beginning of the summer of 1944 he organizes pickup baseball games for his young charges, who are mostly 12-year-old boys. But as the summer progresses he watches in horror as several of the boys fall sick and die, turning what should have been an idyllic summer into a nightmare. At the urging of his panicked fiancée, Bucky leaves Newark for a job at the more bucolic (and ostensibly safer) environment of a summer camp in rural Pennsylvania. But polio emerges there, too, and Bucky must face the question of whether or not he brought it with him.

Of course because this is a Philip Roth book we must spend a lot of time considering Bucky’s masculinity. He is strong and fit and handsome but to his deep disappointment, his bad eyesight has kept him out of the army. His buddies are invading Normandy, but he is supervising children. Ah, the contradictions! I cannot tell you how many pages are filled as Roth explores this issue, over and over and over again. And if I was looking for any insights into what it was like to be a 12-year-old girl in Weequahic in 1944 (which is EXACTLY the age my mother-in-law was) I certainly didn’t find it in this book, where the only female characters are some nameless girls who jump rope in one corner of the playground (and apparently never contract polio; did only boys get it?), and the fiancée who does almost nothing but whine. To quote my mother-in-law, oy vey.

Apparently there was no polio epidemic in Newark in 1944, but there was one in 1952, and each mid-century summer brought polio scares around the U.S. until the polio vaccine was made widely available in the late 1950’s. I recently asked my father what he remembered about polio as a child in the 1940’s in West Philadelphia and he said he mostly remembered his mother’s anxiety. “We used to swim in Darby Creek and she was terrified that we would catch polio from the creek water. So we just lied to her and told her we weren’t swimming.” So clearly in his case the anxiety was confined to the adults. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my grandmother to be constantly worried that her children could catch a fatal disease just from playing outside. For me that’s a much more interesting topic than whether or not Bucky Cantor is real man or not.

(Book 31, 2011)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

As a girl I was obsessed with books about Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I (and indeed about all the queens and princesses of England). My favorites were by authors like Margaret Campbell Barnes (whose 1944 classic Brief Gaudy Hour is still in print) and Jean Plaidy, whose Tudor Saga and Stuart Saga kept me occupied for one entire summer when I was about 12. More recent entries to the canon include books by Alison Weir and Phillipa Gregory. I am not sure why, but I haven’t liked these as much. Maybe I just got tired of them all after a while.

But now Hilary Mantel has given us Wolf Hall, which tells the story again from an entirely new and fresh angle, through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s most trusted advisor throughout the English Reformation, the man who oversaw Henry’s divorce from Katherine and facilitated Anne’s ascension to the throne. “Facilitated” is the operative word here, for, as Mantel depicts him, Cromwell is a master at the game of thrones: a skilled negotiator, a lawyer, a financier, and most interesting of all, a virtuoso at empathy, at figuring out exactly how to convince each player to go along with Henry’s plans. He is also, surprise surprise, extremely funny, with a dry wit that carries him through all kinds of challenges.

Cromwell was never a central character in the books I read as a girl. Along with Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey he was one of the boring old men who filled in the background. But Mantel has turned Cromwell into a fascinating character and dare I say it? I now have a crush on him. Mantel’s Cromwell is a warm, sensitive man who for years mourns the death of his wife and daughters, who fosters several young nephews with wisdom and affection, who works the system (such as it is) to arrive at the fairest settlement he can for Katherine and her daughter Mary, and who never forgets (or tries to hide) his humble origins as the son of a blacksmith.

Mantel writes the whole book as if we are observing from a camera mounted on Cromwell’s head. The narrative hews so closely to his perspective that she simply refers to Cromwell as “he” throughout the novel, sometimes causing confusion, until you understand what she’s doing. It’s very effective in making the reader identify so closely with Cromwell’s point of view. Know also that this book is very very long and slow going. It took me months to finish it, though I confess to occasionally cheating on Master Cromwell with various other (less demanding) books.

(Book 30, 2011)

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young

This book starts out so gently: it’s the story of Riley, a sensitive working class boy in pre-WWI London, taken in by an aristocratic (but non-conformist) family, educated beyond his station, treated with kindness and encouragement, until he embarks on a “thing” with the family’s daughter Nadine, at which point he is banished; turns out they are only so liberal after all. This part of the story fills the first third of the book, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the rest of the book would concern itself with the sweetness of the young couple’s triumph over class-based adversity.

Well guess again. Riley, in a fit of pique, joins the army and is quickly shunted off to the trenches of World War I--we all know what happened there. And Young doesn’t spare us any details. In the turn of a page the book transforms from a pleasing love story into one of the most brutal war stories I’ve ever read. We watch Riley change from a green boy to a ravaged bitter man who endures horrific battles and eventually winds up with a gruesome injury. Young doesn’t spare Nadine either. To spite her parents, Nadine joins the VAD and suffers her own form of hell as she is sent to the front as a battlefield nurse.

Both Nadine and Riley (and several other secondary characters) are suffering from serious cases of PTSD by the end of the book, and I thought I might be too. I haven’t cried this much while reading a book in a long time. It’s horribly sad and beautifully written and a really great read, if you have the stomach for it. I loved it.

(Book 29, 2011)