I read this book while on a road trip through the back roads of the Indian state of Karnataka, driving among Hindu ruins that are nearly 1,000 years old. It was, to put things mildly, quite an amazing kind of cognitive dissonance, to be reading about the Swiss Alps or the streets of Montmartre while exploring dusty country highways while dozens of little sidewalk shacks offering Cokes and samosas. (Not to mention, imagining the characters skiing merrily along while baking in humid 40-Celcius heat.)

One way to describe this story is a revisionist feminist history of Ernest Hemingway and his early work, especially The Sun Also Rises. And in this sense it’s a devestating account, telling us what we already know - that Hemingway was the worst kind of jerk, subjecting his wife to all sorts of emotional cruelty, and his friends and supporters to nasty rebukes and vicious betrayals. Layered on top of that is the observation waiting to be made, that Hemingway’s artistic insistence on truth, on writing a story with the minimum and plain language, contrasted sharply with the way he lived his life, lying to his wife as a matter of course and escaping his dilemmas with the most elaborate kinds of schemes and adventures.

And also this story serves as a sort of oral history of the ex-pat community in pre-Depression Paris, with an all-star cast including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and on and on. There’s a sort of romantic idea, I suppose captured pretty well in Hemingway’s description of Paris as a movable feast, that these artists led a glamorous, joyful life filled with ideas, a sort of non-stop intellectual party. McLain debunks that idea, exposing all the many betrayals, bruised feelings, infidelities, and plain cruelties that infused ex-pat Paris. The bull-fighting scenes, in particular, drive this point home marvelously: we follow Hemingway and his compatriots to Madrid, ostensibly in search of, I don’t know, truth, or perhaps the experience of humanity driven to the limit, or the like. In fact what we see is the glorification of terrible cruelty in the name of cheap thrills - and of course I mean cruelty both inside the ring (with the matador and the bulls) and outside the ring (with the tense and ridiculous squabbling among Hemingway and friends.)

And finally this story is one about legacy and greatness, the hunger for recognition by one’s peers, by complete strangers, both in one’s own time and many years afterward. Hemingway is consciously obsessed with that hunger, more so than his peers, and in a way it seems to ruin him - not from the point of his own career, which obviously was very successful. But his personal life suffered sharply from that obsession, so much so that he divorced four times, appeared to have lost many good friends along the way to his own recklessness, and of course, committed suicide. So sure, he was successfull in establishing a long-lasting legacy - but did he have a good life? And which is more important? Are both possible? It’s a vexing question just under the surface.

The Paris Wife is gripping and fascinating reading, a compelling debunking of a towering literary legacy. It’s not exactly fun reading - after all there is a sort of misery that runs all the way through the story, nearly from beginning to end - but it’s certainly worthwhile.