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A First Wife Can Be So Stolid and Clueless and Plain and Pregnant

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The strikingly attractive cover of “The Paris Wife” depicts a glamorous, poised-looking woman perched in a Paris cafe. She wears a belted, tailored dress reminiscent of the late 1940s or early 1950s. Her face cannot be seen, but her posture radiates confidence and freedom. The picture is interesting because it has absolutely nothing to do with the book it is selling.

Stephen Curti

Paula McLain

THE PARIS WIFE

By Paula McLain

320 pages. Ballantine Books. $25.

The heroine of “The Paris Wife” is Hadley Richardson, the athletic, sturdily built, admittedly unfashionable homebody who married Ernest Hemingway in 1921. They were divorced in 1927. Hadley was, by all accounts including this one, a very fine and decent person, but she was the starter wife of a man who wound up treating her terribly. Had she not married him, no novelist would be telling her story.

But Paula McLain has built “The Paris Wife” around Hadley. Or at least she has planted Hadley in the midst of a lot of famous, ambitious people. The advantage to this technique is that it allows the reader to rub shoulders and bend elbows with celebrated literary types: the stay-at-home way of feeling like the soigné figure on the book cover. The drawback is that Ms. McLain’s Hadley, when not in big-league company that overshadows her, isn’t a subtly drawn character. She’s thick, and not just in physique. She’s slow on the uptake, and she can be a stodgy bore.

“Why couldn’t I be happy?” she asks herself at the start of the novel. “And just what was happiness anyway?” She has just met the younger Hemingway at a party in Chicago in 1920; she herself wasn’t all that young during their courtship. “I was 29, feeling almost obsolete, but Ernest was 21 and white hot with life,” she confides. “What was I thinking?” (Come on. We know what she was thinking.) And: “He was a light-footed lad on a Grecian urn chasing truth and beauty. Where did I fit in exactly?”

“The Paris Wife” raises fewer questions about Hadley’s thinking than it does about Ms. McLain’s. This novel draws heavily on research, but it does so in confounding ways. When Hadley describes writing a letter to her sweetheart, for instance, is the book paraphrasing a real letter? Let’s hope so, because if not, she is just being dull. “I made my reply last all day, putting things down as they happened,” Hadley says, “wanting to be sure he could picture me moving from room to room, practicing the piano, sitting down to a perfect cup of ginger tea with my friend Alice Hunt, watching our gardener prune the rosebushes and swaddle them in burlap for winter.”

Hadley’s real voice, at least as quoted in Hemingway’s Paris memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” isn’t dissimilar to Ms. McLain’s version. But in the context of his writing she sounds much livelier. Historically, Hemingway used his first wife as a sounding board as he framed his own ideas. He also invoked her with wit, selectivity and care.

The first third of the “The Paris Wife” is its most cliché-ridden. (“Did you ever think it could be like this?” “I can do anything if I have you with me.”) And it moves ploddingly. (“Grace had me pinned in the parlor, talking about the superiority of European lace, while Dr. Hemingway hovered with a plate of cheeses and beets he’d preserved himself, from his garden in Walloon Lake.”) For the reader’s purposes, these two can’t get to Paris fast enough. They go there from Chicago after the playwright Sherwood Anderson recommends the change of scenery. “Everything’s interesting and everyone has something to contribute,” he says. “Paris, Hem. Give it some thought.”

Once the couple gets to Paris, the book’s real name dropping begins. Along come Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. And their great works become topics of stilted banter. Here is Ms. McLain’s version of lifelike chat: “ ‘Everyone says “Ulysses” is great,’ Ernest said. ‘I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.’ ” As for Hadley, she doesn’t add much to these conversations, but she replays them for the reader. And she is very polite: “I spooned up my delicious soup as quietly as a mouse.” “The Paris Wife” turns into a bizarre pastiche when Ms. McLain begins borrowing and repurposing familiar voices. Hadley walks by the Île St.-Louis, goes down to the Seine, watches the fishermen and eats fried goujon — just as Hemingway did in his essay “People of the Seine.” Zelda Fitzgerald paraphrases Daisy Buchanan’s dialogue from “The Great Gatsby.” The noisy, real-life models for characters in “The Sun Also Rises” suddenly drop into the story en masse. And Hadley learns to talk more like her husband. She begins using simple declarative sentences. In the end he says Hadley is “everything good and straight and fine and true.” She says he is “fine and strong and weak and cruel.”

Throughout the book Ms. McLain relies on clumsy foreshadowing, to the point where Hadley can spy a “delicious-looking” baby, then find out on the very next page that she is pregnant. Once the Hemingways’ son is born Hadley’s situation rapidly becomes untenable. Hard-partying bohemian expatriates don’t much like babies. And they don’t like fidelity either. After Hadley makes the dreadful gaffe of losing the valise that held all of Hemingway’s early work, the great man thinks he has an excuse to be angry. His mind and body begin to wander.

At this point Pauline Pfeiffer worms her way into the novel so boldly that even Hadley senses trouble. Pauline, who is as chic as Hadley is frumpy, makes herself an instant fixture in the Hemingway household. She wildly flatters Hemingway about his writing. She gives Hadley the alarming pet name “Dulla,” and then insists on becoming Hadley’s closest chum. She borrows Hadley’s slippers, merrily saying, “You won’t be able to pry them off me.” In a feat of world-class back stabbing she crusades secretly to become Hemingway’s next wife (the second of four).

Was this changing of the guard an end for Hemingway? Or was it a new beginning? Get ready for abundant debate on issues raised by “The Paris Wife,” because what it lacks in style is made up for in staying power. This is a work of literary tourism that expertly flatters its reader. It invokes an artist-packed Paris where “nearly anyone might feel like a painter.” It keeps Hadley so trusting and good-hearted that it’s impossible for the reader not to spot trouble, i.e., get smart before she does. And it heats up a blaze of righteous indignation on her behalf.

Oh, Hadley, you could have been such a fine helpmate to that man if he hadn’t been such a louse. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

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