"Each Mrs. Hemingway thought their love would last forever. Each one was wrong." A man of famously outsize appetites, Ernest Hemingway married four times, eventually destroying each relationship through his hunger for another woman. In deft, elegant prose, Naomi Wood (The Godless Boys) tells the intertwined stories of Hemingway's wives: Hadley, Pauline, Martha and Mary. The saga of Hemingway's meteoric career, his many exploits and his tragic end is well known, but Wood fills in the details, drawing on letters and telegrams to create dynamic portraits of the four women behind the man.
Wood opens each section of the novel with the end of a marriage: the holiday in Antibes, France, where Pauline triumphed over Hadley; the hot day in Key West, Fla., when Pauline first met Martha. Each section shifts back and forth in time, tracing the arc of each affair from the glorious, passionate beginning to the final, bitter denouement. Each woman reacts differently to her displacement, from Hadley's gracious abdication to Martha's furious exit. But they remain bound to each other by the man who inspired such passion and heartbreak. Hemingway himself is central but opaque, an unknowable sun who pulls women--wives, lovers, mistresses--into his orbit.
"Each decade has its triptych," notes Mary Welsh, the final wife, after Hemingway's death. Wood's intimate portrayal of all four triptychs is at once a meditation on marriage and a rare treat for Hemingway devotees. Fans of The Paris Wife and Hemingway's Girl will be captivated by this elegiac, exquisitely drawn novel. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams