Paula McLain, the author of The Paris Wife, is a poet with an MFA degree. I don’t like to say that this explains a lot about the way her novel is written, because what do I know? But such are my suspicions when I read her long sentences–run-ons are so emotional, like Ulysses, yes I said yes I said “and” and “and” and “and” until the text has absorbed all my narrator’s feelings! I can hear the MFA in her vaguely-angled, off-to-infinity endings, all soaked in the type of imagery that comes straight from a writer’s learned subconscious once they’ve absorbed 10000 short stories that all end in some lessened version of The Great Gatsby‘s “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Take this, for example, which is in the introduction: “And the tea will boil in the teapot, and I’ll tell a story about a girl she and I both knew a hundred years ago in the Louis, and we’ll feel like quick and natural friends while across the yard, in the sawmill, a dog will start barking and keep barking and he won’t stop for anything.”
But I should stop. The Paris Wife is a great summer read. It’s narrated by Ernest Hemingway’s dowdy and square first wife Hadley, a woman who goes to Paris with her brooding alcoholic squire and is instantly forced into the “wife’s corner” at all those famous Gertrude Stein salons where literature’s most famous people drank absinthe and hacked through the beginnings of modernism and cheated on each other with each other. It’s shamelessly romantic and sensory and gossipy. And if it gets a little precious at times (actually, it’s precious most of the time, with phrases like “bourbon and soap, tobacco and damp cotton,” “sharp and lovely” heaped onto one another like in descriptions at a second-rate Etsy store) it’s fine.
The last 75 pages or so of this book revolve around Hemingway taking a mistress, Pauline (who was Hadley’s friend first–naturally) and Hadley dwindling into this sad-sack, numb lady who lets the two of them walk all over her. It’s pretty depressing, particularly when Pauline goes on vacation with the two of them and acts like Hadley’s best friend while getting a secret knock and a sex hour every day at 2 PM. It’s really depressing when Pauline slips into bed with them and Hadley writes “I knew what was happening, and I also didn’t want to come awake enough to feel it. The bed was sand, the sheets were sand. I was still in the dream.”
GIRL. Get out of there. Leave your man, smack that hooker and take your child (“Bumby”) to a nice daycare or something. Which she does, eventually, much to this reader’s relief.
My husband was leaning over my shoulder as I was reading this post and burst out laughing at your last line. Too true! It sounds very like Jean Rhys.