When asked by a friend to describe this novel, I said that it was a mean story about mean people who do mean things to one another. More specifically, Hemingway is exercising a kind of casual, detached social criticism with Harry Morgan, a down-on-his-luck captain of a private fishing boat, and his attempts to do business with a series of lowlifes who at their best prove untrustworthy, and at their worst lethal. Viewed as Depression-era social criticism, the novel is half-baked and unconvincing, but I suspect that Hemingway was no more convinced of his social message than Harry Morgan is convinced by the politics of the young Cuban revolutionary he agrees to smuggle out of Key West with three other men in the novel's third part. Harry is no bleeding-heart, and he is as quick to toss his friend Albert's dead body off his boat and into the sea as he is to grieve over him. To me, the point of the book is not that the author Richard Gordon, for example, is a "have" and that Harry Morgan is a "have not," and isn’t that a shame. The point is that, in Key West, anyway, the two live right next to one another. ( )

First of all: chapter 24 should have been COMPLETELY EXCISED by Scribner's editors. It has nothing to do with the story, which itself is mundane and, for Hemingway, borning. One of his more empty efforts. ( )

The original New York Times review in 1937 put it this way:
"Mr. Hemingway has been for some years an outstanding figure in American literature; he has influenced greatly men a little younger than himself, and they have paid him the tribute of imitation. Whatever he does is of interest because he has, unquestionably, a very real talent. What has he done with it in To Have and Have Not?"

It's a good question, and one that hasn't really been answered in the 70 years since then. Some have said Hemingway hated the book himself and only wrote it to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. But how could he be contractually obliged to write an awful book? Even if somebody did set the subject matter, surely he could have produced something better than this?

The main problem with the book is that it is schizophrenic. It's a cross between an adolescent high-seas adventure story and a social analysis of the effects of the Great Depression. Even if both could be crammed into one book, it's probably safe to say that fans of one genre are unlikely to be fans of the other.

The writing style, too, is schizophrenic, lurching from first person to third person, from one character's point of view to another's. Harry Morgan's character, too, changes. He starts out as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting Hemingway hero, but later on, as the whole idea of the book seems to change midstream, he becomes more of a Steinbeck-style poor old victim of the system. His wife and children then appear in the book, looking as if they have been grafted on to make him appear more sympathetic. Then rich people start to appear, being vile and self-obsessed but never fully drawn as characters. Their only role appears to be to act as "haves" to contrast against the "have nots".

Another major problem I had with the book was its racism. You could argue that Hemingway was showing his characters to be racist, but still the constant, overwhelming use of words like "nigger" and "chink" really shocked me and immediately put me off the book. And worse than the words themselves were the way the characters of other races were described as objects more than people, with no characters beyond crude racial stereotypes like lazy blacks and untrustworthy Chinese. They are hardly ever even given names, but just referred to by their race: "the [insert racial slur] said...."

Well, I suppose every good writer has a clunker. I still like Hemingway's writing, particularly in For Whom the Bell Tolls. So this book did teach me one thing: don't judge an author by one book alone. If this had been my first Hemingway book, I'd probably never have read another, and as a result I'd have missed out on some fantastic writing. ( )

It's said that Ernest Hemingway considered To Have and Have Not his worst novel, demonstrating that Papa was more self-aware than commonly believed. It's also said that he wrote it only to fulfil a contract, or because he needed cash. That's plausible, but it's no excuse. This novel is vile; it begins badly, and deteriorates from there.

A summary: Harry Morgan, like his piratical namesake, is a good man pushed into crime by the times and by bad luck. His luck just gets worse. Times are tough in Key West, at least for the locals. They're not so bad for all the rotten rich people in their yachts. Why are good men poor and bad men rich? The end.

To Have and Have Not is two short stories grafted onto a novel. It begins badly: as far as we can see at the outset, Harry Morgan isn't really a good man but a pirate -- thus, no doubt, the name. When we get through those stories into the novel proper, Harry suddenly grows a sympathetic wife and three daughters, for whom he's struggling to provide, and a bunch of dissipated rich people show up and take over the story. All this arrives too late; the whole thing seems disjointed, messy, as if Hemingway couldn't be bothered with rewriting it to unify the story.

This is also his worst writing -- it often reads as a bad parody of Hemingway, a screenplay for a cheesy noir film featuring stereotypical sailors and brassy blondes. The opening stories might not give you a sympathetic Morgan -- he's brutal, and casually racist -- but at least they're well written. Part 3, in which Morgan emerges as decent, is not.

Read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then this. It's hard to believe it's really the same writer.

Social commentary - poor and faithful spouses verses rich and cheating ones. Adventure, fishing. Interesting that I liked it so much since it deals with a topic I'm not interested in. Romantic. ( )