On Our Bookshelves: The Sun Also Rises

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NOVEL: The Sun Also Rises

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1926

REVIEW:

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I picked up a copy of The Sun Also Rises at the Hemingway House in Key West when I visited recently, and read it on the plane on my way home. (I’d read it before, but it had been many years and it felt like the right time for a revisit.) It was Hemingway’s first novel, written about the people he knew (only barely disguised), a group of English and American expats, and the places they went (Paris, Pamplona). Hemingway’s style is easy to mock but hard to imitate–minimalist, and understated in the extreme. He himself described it as an iceberg: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

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The action in the novel is simple enough–they go to cafes, they drink to excess, they have affairs, they fight with each other, they attend bullfights at the fiesta. Jake Barnes (the Hemingway stand in) and Lady Brett Ashley (based on Duff Twysden) are the central characters–they can’t consummate their affair due to Jake’s war wound, which has left him impotent. She is a beautiful wreck: damaged, promiscuous, and restless. Much of what’s important is left unspoken: loneliness, jealousy, grief, loss, post-war trauma, alienation, vulnerability, the aimlessness of their lives, their inability to connect or to find meaning, (I rather wonder if Truman Capote admired this novel–the relationship between the narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Holly Golightly seems to owe something to the one between Jake and Brett.)

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The portrait of this group of unhappy and confused people is extremely well done–vivid and memorable in its description of their hedonistic excesses. There are flashes of brilliant dialogue, some truly arresting and evocative locales, and a wry humor. The extent of the anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism in the text is shocking to today’s reader, although quite true to the period. Hemingway is often criticized for his sexism and hyper-masculinity (and far be it from me to defend his treatment of his wives) but his portrayal of Brett here is sympathetic and nuanced; even as she causes harm, she’s not malicious, just aimless and flawed, very much like the men she spends her time with. And really, that’s the question here–whether they were, as Gertrude Stein famously described them, a Lost Generation, or alternately, a resilient one, battered (as Hemingway put it) but carrying on anyway in the face of despair, corruption, and disillusionment. That’s for each reader to decide. I will note that the issues addressed in The Sun Also Rises are as resonant today as ever. At this time, we haven’t faced the horrors of what they then called the Great War, but we are facing a pandemic, climate change, and a global trend toward authoritarianism. What shall we make of all of this? How shall we live? Can we do any better? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

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It’s a modernist classic, an easy, if at times painful, read, and an important part of our cultural history, perhaps best appreciated in the company of some absinthe.

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