Book of the week: Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson

(Knopf, $30)

“There exists a general feeling” that Ernest Hemingway “was better earlier; the books were better, he was better as a man,” said James Salter in The New York Review of Books. At age 35, he was already being called out by critics for the egotism and self-indulgence in the works that followed The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Paul Hendrickson’s “rich and enthralling” new book picks up the great writer’s life at that moment, when he fulfills a lifelong dream by purchasing a 38-foot seagoing fishing boat and begins using it as an escape. The decision to give the Pilar center stage “feels inspired,” said Steve Weinberg in CSMonitor.com. During Hemingway’s final 27 years, as his writing and eventually his mental state both declined, the boat was where he lived—fighting marlins, his demons, sometimes even his friends.

Don’t let the title mislead you, said Allan Massie in The Wall Street Journal. The boat gets top billing, but this is very much a book about Hemingway, “about what was good in him and what was bad; about what brought a man who took pleasure in so much to the point where he could take his own life,” by shotgun, at age 61. Hendrickson’s assessments are clear-eyed. Hemingway’s work was obviously affected by the weight of his reputation. “The writer who had once left everything out” suddenly began “to put everything in.” Hemingway’s drinking took a toll, as did head traumas he sustained while boxing and in two 1954 plane crashes. Hendrickson’s most provocative assertion, which he makes “entirely without salacity,” is that Hemingway may have suppressed a sexual ambivalence similar to that of his son Gregory, a transsexual.

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It’s long been a pastime of scholars to guess what went wrong for Hemingway, said Howell Raines in The Washington Post. Hendrickson, who has spent three decades digging into the writer’s life, may have finally solved the mystery. His insightful account of his subject’s illnesses and loss of control might inspire you to deduce that from about age 40, Hemingway was “suffering from organic brain damage” and yet soldiering on with his work. Hendrickson’s Hemingway seems to be the true man—an artist of two conflicting essences, “one of purely original genius and one of irreversible destructiveness.” We shouldn’t think of him as having let his audience down. Rather, he “snatched his art from the steadily closing jaws of mental disability.”