The Paris Wife by Paula McLain.

You may have already surmised that I did not like this book. It’s not really the book’s fault. It’s not badly written. In fact, I enjoyed parts of it. But I disliked every one of the characters except for the baby, who isn’t born until halfway through the book and doesn’t learn to talk until the end.

That is, I dislike the characters when I can tell them apart. Throughout this whole book, all of the characters we encounter come up with nicknames for each other. Multiple nicknames. Let me tell you a true thing: when the characters are called by different names on every page, it’s very hard to care what’s happening.

So. The Paris Wife. Her name is Hadley (aka Tatie, Cat, Feather Cat, Hen, Hash, Hashedad, or Hasovitch). Her husband is Ernest Hemingway (aka Tatie, Stump, Hem, Wem, Bird, Nesto, or Papa).

Time for spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear them.

For the majority of the novel, Hadley is fine but boring, a bit of a doormat. She sacrifices her dreams for her husband’s career, lives to please him, puts up with his every whim, caters to his moods, looks the other way when he flirts with women. She’s weak and uninspiring, but also under the thumb of a depressed man who doles out healthy helpings of emotional abuse.

The title of this book is brilliant. This character is a woman who defines herself completely by the fact that she is a wife and she exists to attend to her husband. I think she’s happy for about 5 pages of the novel.

What really blew my mind was when Hadley went on an extended vacation with Hemingway and his mistress (her best friend). Hadley knew they were having an affair and professed to being torn up inside while she bantered cheerfully and went on diving excursions with them. At one point, the mistress actually gets into bed with Hemingway and Hadley and has sex with him while she’s in the bed. It’s not a threesome. They just think she won’t notice, or think she doesn’t have the stones to object. And they’re right.

Also: Hadley and Hemingway worry a lot about having the money to pay rent, etc, but they also travel extensively through Europe, drink champagne like water, and usually have hired domestic help. Reality check?

I think there would have been a way to write this character so that she appeared to be in the grips of emotional crisis, paralyzed by feeling, incapable of action at this moment, but this author did not succeed in portraying that. She portrayed a woman who just believed her husband’s feelings were more important than her own, and didn’t know how to stand up for herself. Which still could have been written in an interesting way – except that it wasn’t.

There was no tension in this book. Everything was just inevitable and hopeless, all the time.None of the characters grew, and neither did I, reading about them. This book might be someone’s cup of tea, but not mine.