The Paris Pilgrims: A Novel - Hardcover

Set among the legendary literati and libertines of 1920s Paris, the late Carlile's (Children of the Dust) quasifictional account of Ernest Hemingway's adventures as a Left Bank expatriate is a titillating, if far-fetched, cornucopia of big names, gossip and sexual intrigue. Published to mark Hemingway's centenary birthday, the narrative runs amok with the reputations of such well-known figures as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes and Hilda Doolittle. Cameo appearances often seem contrived (Edna St. Vincent Millay caught in a sapphic kiss at Natalie Barney's salon), as do repeated walk-ons by the likes of Picasso, Braque, Colette and Cocteau. Opening with a name-dropping Hemingway meeting Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, her Paris bookstore, the book closes with Beach name-dropping as she tearfully sends the Hemingways back to the States. Among other people who turn up in this maze of artistic celebrities is a sniveling, frail "Jim" Joyce, who's given to scatological and submissive fantasies, and is, of course, sloshed, and "ambisexual" publisher/writer Robert McAlmon, who is married to the wealthy poet Bryher, who is shacked up with her lover, the poet H.D., in the Alps. Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, spend most of their time in Paris hungover after drinking debauches, scrounging for cash and angling for patrons and publishers. The Hemingway portrayed here is a pompous pugilist who generally loses his matches, a man unduly fixated on seducing, and having his wife seduced by, lesbians, while at the same time his violent disgust for male homosexuality thinly disguises his own latent tendencies. Hem's selfish whining and flailing quickly turns tiresome, especially when Hadley becomes pregnant and he obsesses over a possible abortion. Annoying character portrayals aside, this episodic yarn is undeniably entertaining, with such episodes as the Venetian police busting Cole Porter's spicy soiree, Hemingway overcome with lust for Gertrude Stein, and a covey of literary wives steamed at their unflattering portraits in husbands' fiction. Less a coherent novel than a hodgepodge of irreverent, decadent tall tales, it is a good summer read for those who enjoy voyeuristic gossip about the talented and famous.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Paris may have been yesterday, as the late Janet Flanner observed, but the sex-mad City of Light portrayed in this ludicrously bad documentary novel by the author of Honky Tonk Man (1980), etc., is an intemperate never-neverland populated by historical characters reshaped into pulpy cartoon figures. Carliles subject is young Ernest Hemingway, having survived WWI, married Hadley Richardson, and embarked for la belle France in 1922. The fun begins aboard ship, when the belligerent Ernest demands a match with a professional boxerand the adoring Hadley knits him a pair of lavender trunks. No doubt that imagery, uh, colors their later relations with such Parisian eminences as ``lesbian lionesses'' Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Barneynot to mention Gertrude Stein and her devoted ``Pussy'' Alice B. Toklas. In this bloated epic of namedropping, the most creative and energetic denizens of that time and place are revealed in all their lubricious inglory. James Joyce is a coprophiliac drunk (wife Nora understandably propositions Ernest, but is gently rejected); Ezra Pound a randy, foulmouthed anti-Semite; expatriate bisexual rich brat Robert McAlmon joins Ernest in Madrid to see the bullfights, share ``roasted cojones,'' andin this amazingly abrasive novel's wildest flight of fancysubmit to being buggered by his insistently masculine companion (in Spain they say si si?). I never feel more alive than when I'm killing something,'' Ernest confesses, in one of innumerable ingenuous oversimplifications here. There's much, much more in the same vein: the relationship of Stein and Toklas, for example, is delineated with unrelenting crudity (Carlile on lesbian love is rather like Tom Clancy on high-tech warfare). Finally, mercifully, it ends, as the (undoubtedly exhausted) Hemingways return to America. A witlessly reductive romp distinguishedif that's the wordby breathless high-school prose, dime-store psychology, and enough unintentional humor to rival Monica's Story. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.