The Next-to-Last Page: April 2022

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Review: In Our Time

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When people ask me, I recommend that they start their experience of Hemingway with this book. It’s where Hemingway found his voice and – alongside The Sun Also Rises – it’s the best book he ever managed to write.

I’m reading this for the umpteenth time. It’s one of the few books that I feel as if I have come close to memorizing. That’s a matter not just of my having read it so often but also of Hemingway’s having distilled his prose to such a fine point that almost every word feels necessary. Having read it, I know what has to come next in most of the stories.

A couple of these are clunkers. “Mr. and Mrs. Elliott” is a mean-spirited takedown of effete wannabe poets. And “A Very Short Story” reeks of a self-pity beneath the ethical imagination of most of the rest of this.

But “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” “The Battler,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Big Two-Hearted River” are all models of the Modern American style of the short story. And, interspersed with the “chapters” that give us glimpses of the violence of war and bullfighting, they take on even more power.

There are reasons to criticize Hemingway, above all the way he mythologized a form of toxic masculinity that still infects much of American society. If you read this carefully, though, you can see that Hemingway criticized that impulse himself. At this early stage, when he was just discovering his voice and his vision, he understood the limits of the masculine self he was exploring. It didn’t take long for him to harden his insights into a “code,” and then it didn’t take much longer beyond that for him to replace the irony of his discovery with self-aggrandizement and self-pity.

Here, though, where it all started, we can get the purest glimpse of an artist who changed the aesthetics of American culture.

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