Naomi Wood

This is a lovely book, thoughtful and very human.

It's not exactly cheerful: after all, this is the story of four really crappy marriages, focused tightly on the first and last moments/months of each relationship. And frankly I've never liked Hemingway's work (soft spot for A Movable Feast though!), in large part because of the major asshole manly man vibes in both form and substance. This is a guy with the problems and characteristics that have most hurt people I love, and that I've most show more avoided in my own relationships.

And yet it's not depressing. It's just so open and kindhearted toward its own characters. A beautiful study (sometimes I felt like I was reading, somehow, a Virginia Woolf novel about Hemingway and these four wives), Mrs. Hemingway also plays with the line between fiction and history, an endeavor I pretty much always find interesting. show less

In the same vein as The Paris Wife, Mrs. Hemingway tells of life with ERnest Hemingway as seen through the eyes of each of his wives: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gelhorn and Mary Welsh. Hemingway may have been a great writer (although that is debatable to many), but there is no doubt that he was a congenital depressive and an absolute pig to women.

As each of his wives tell her story, a sad and damning portrait of Hemingway emerges - insecure, jealous, self-centered and show more unwilling to divest himself of his own myth of the swaggering conquering hero. As his ability to write starts to disappear, he drowns himself in drink and depression, ultimately blowing his head off in 1961.

In the end, each of his wives seem to be far better off without him. show less

Entertaining but superficial, author Naomi Wood has taken one of the least dynamic features of Ernest Hemingway's storied life – his wives – and crafted a solid soap opera out of it. In her narrative, Wood flits backwards and forwards in time, with each part of the novel – named after each of Hemingway's four wives, and written from their perspectives – revolving around how Papa would move on from each of them in turn. Whilst still with Hadley, Fife arrives; with Fife, Martha show more arrives; with Martha, Mary arrives; with Mary, the shotgun arrives. He left each of them before he thought they would leave him, Wood tells us, and she does well to highlight such patterns in Hemingway's life in her prose.

However, Mrs. Hemingway never becomes more than the chick-lit that its premise, marketing and prose style all suggest. It's all rather safe; there's little real tension in the story, despite the philandering and the alcoholism and so on. Hemingway, who was very autobiographical in his fiction, wrote about these same events much better; it is unfair, perhaps, to compare Wood's writing to the marital tension in, for example, 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber', but given the subject matter of her book the comparisons are inevitable.

The main drawback is that Wood's book will be the first point of entry for many of a certain demographic into Hemingway's body of work, and it offers up a rather wrong-headed interpretation. Absent are any of the truly remarkable things about Hemingway – his prose style, his eye for detail, his taste for life, his wealth of biography – which might induce a reader to find out more. This is a writer who deserves to be read. Instead, his attraction is, in Wood's telling, largely due to a fake charisma and emotional manipulation, to career success and physical appeal (summarised lamely as "What a pull he has! What a magnetism!" (pg. 126)). Knowing her audience, perhaps, Wood is unwilling to betray the sisterhood; Ernest is the abusive villain here, whilst the wives (even Martha, somewhat incredibly) are meek innocents bamboozled by his presence. Even when they are calculating how to steal him from under the nose of the previous wife, they are portrayed as guileless. The flaw in Wood's book is not so much in fictionalizing Hemingway's life (the recurring character of Harry Cuzzemano is made up, but it works), but in editorializing it.

Wood has found a creative opportunity in telling the story of (or rather, a story about) the Hemingway wives, but while one can see why the book was written, it is not all that apparent why it should be read. However tastefully done, the life in question deserves a much greater stage than to be mere chick-lit fodder – indeed, Hemingway himself only managed to cover it by devoting a lifetime of writing to it, from his youth in 'Indian Camp' and 'Big Two-Hearted River' through Paris and Spain in The Sun Also Rises to the Gulf Stream of The Old Man and the Sea and the manuscripts about the African veldt. Attempts to "find the real Hemingway" are like attempts to find the real Shakespeare. Why would you bother? You have their work, which is superior to the man. show less

I've had this book on my 'to read' list for three years now since I read a storming review about it when it was first published. At last I came across a copy of it last week in my local secondhand shop, and it lived up to the hype.

In this novel Naomi Wood creates a fictionalised account of the four marriages of Ernest Hemingway, portraying a man who loved his wives deeply yet who loved women in general too much to ever commit to monogamy. Four sections are narrated by each of the four wives, show more and it's an interesting angle through which to explore the heyday of that era and the personal life of one of the literary greats. The book takes us from Hemingway on the cusp of success in Paris to his final marriage when he begins to feel washed up as an author and ends up taking his own life.

The dramas of a third person in each marriage are played out amidst a fabulous social backdrop that includes the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Wood portrays him as a good looking man with incredible charisma, whose wives are (mostly) so infatuated with him they're desperate to overlook his indiscretions if he'll only stay with them.

This book works on so many levels. The crowded marriages are made up of complex relationships between the philandering author, the wives and the mistresses, who all become inevitably, reluctantly intertwined with each other. The affairs never stay secret for long in the wild, arty social circles in which Hemingway moves, and the famous Lost Generation are every bit as fascinating as the Bloomsbury Group were in London. It's also a fly on the wall account of the making and downfall of a darling of the literary world, and of the immense challenges of being married to a genius and dealing with the emotional swings that such temperament brings.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and flew through it over the weekend. There's something about those arty social sets from the early 20th century that's so absorbing, and it's prompted me to push some of Hemingway's work up on my to read list.

5 stars - a fabulous page-turner. Don't be put off by the chic lit-esque cover. show less