Yawn. Don't bother.

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In 1921, 29 year-old Hadley Richardson married 22 year-old Ernest Hemingway. She followed him to Paris, where Hemingway began his writing career, and they joined the fast-living group of literary ex-patriots including Ezra Pound, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

Primarily, I listened to the audio of this book, and frankly it took me several tries to get started on it. Usually I was in my car and was easily lured away to Sirius satellite radio instead. I think the main reason for this was the narrator though, as I found her voice a little whiny (others in my book club agreed about that).

As for the story itself, it never hooked me but I did enjoy it. About ten years ago I went to Key West on vacation and visited Hemingways house there. Although Ive never really liked his books, the man himself fascinates me. He was bigger than life. So as much as this book focused on Hadley, I was also looking for insight into what made Hemingway tick. And if this fictionalized tale is to be believed, I found plenty of that! This book humanized Hemingway for me.

This was a really great book for a book club it generated lots of discussion. Some members of my book club didnt like the book because they didnt like the character of Hadley and found her too wimpy. Others, including me, disagreed.

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I listened to "The Paris Wife" on Audio CDs. The narrator had an irritating tone to her voice that I found distracting. She sounded like she should be reading a Stephanie Plum novel rather than this. I will give the narrator good marks for pronouncing to this untrained ear some multi-syllable French words.

I had just listened to "American Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld which is a loosely realized story following a charachter similar to Laura Bush. Her husband is a lout and blustering person who becomes governor and later president because he has nothing better to do. What he really loves is baseball and being the owner of a baseball team. He and his overbearing family are concerned about his "legacy" and the wife, totally subsummed by her infactuation with him, allows herself to be bullied and undercut and fianlly betrayed by him...although through her own sense of loyalty to her man.

"The Paris Wife", although from a different era, follows a strikingly similar vein. Hadley falls for Hemingway in the same love-struck way that the American Wife does. Hadley and Hemingway are caught up in a group dynamic similar to the overbearing family of American Wife. Hadley and American Wife are bullied, undercut and betrayed all the while denying what is happening to them by men who have no empahty and are driven by their own sense of destiny.

All in all I found the characters in American Wife better written than Paris Wife; I had little sympathy for Hadley and the writing seemed to present her not as a character of her time but as a dupe to Hemingmway's longings. Paris Wife also failed as an historical set piece for which it had good potential. I came away wishing the writer had created a better environment for her characters to work out there post-war sense of loss and renewal.

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