Books, Arts & Manners: Tonsorial

The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner’s, 256 pp., $18.95)

Hemingway’s weaker novels, based on recycled rather than recent experience, are more autobiographically revealing than his greatest fiction. The Garden of Eden is not nearly as good as Islands in the Stream, but it is worth reading for the light it casts on Hemingway’s second marriage (to Pauline Pfeiffer), his hair fetishism, and his sexual fantasies—though anyone who picks up the novel for descriptions of kinky sex will be seriously disappointed.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner’s, 256 pp., $18.95)

Hemingway’s weaker novels, based on recycled rather than recent experience, are more autobiographically revealing than his greatest fiction. The Garden of Eden is not nearly as good as Islands in the Stream, but it is worth reading for the light it casts on Hemingway’s second marriage (to Pauline Pfeiffer), his hair fetishism, and his sexual fantasies—though anyone who picks up the novel for descriptions of kinky sex will be seriously disappointed.