Book Review: Islands in the Stream
I wrote half this review, along with many notes, shortly after reading, around three months prior to publication. I found it agonizingly hard to finish the review when I was extremely uninspired a few months later, also having forgotten many plot points. Since the Wikipedia summary was also sparse, I enlisted the help of ChatGPT for the first time when writing in my life, just as a research tool. Unfortunately, it gave me entirely wrong information: I asked what happens in the second act and it told me with confidence that Hudson’s eldest son comes to visit, where the entire second act is Hudson’s spiral down as a result of his son dying in war. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Generative AI is vastly overrated and cannot be trusted. That being said, specific plot points in this review are as per my recollection, which much like Hemingway’s, has been weakened by certain vices.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a book review, probably because I’ve been doing pretty poorly on my resolution to read a book every two weeks. Reading is hard. This is the eighteenth book I’ve read in 2024, and probably the best one I’ve read all year. Franzen’s Corrections and Kitchen Confidential are probably runners up. But Islands in the Stream is pure Hemingway, at his most autobiographical, self-aggrandizing, and terse.
Islands in the Stream was actually published posthumously; its draft was found by Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife among his things, mostly completed. I can only imagine the excitement of a Hemingway fan back in the seventies, ten years after his death, and out of the blue, comes an all-new Hemingway book. It is also my favourite Hemingway novel; almost a sampler of every single one of his favourite themes.
The novel is divided into three parts about the life of a fictional American painter who seems to have retired to the Caribbean. Before doing research, I thought the protagonist was a clear Hemingway stand-in: retired to Florida and the Caribbean, had three kids and a few wives, liked fishing, etcetera etcetera. Upon some quick digging, there was actually a painter named Henry Slater that Hemingway had been friends with when he visited Bimini, the title of the section. Slater had went to school with Fitzgerald, and also had a character based on him in This Side of Paradise, another one of my favourite novels. According to his LA Times obituary, he became friends with Hemingway after a barfight in Paris.
Despite this the clear inspiration for the characters, it is always hard to separate Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s protagonists from themselves. But perhaps that’s what they did so well, create a mythos around them that it would be impossible to: Hemingway as a stoic sportsman, and Fitzgerald as his cosmopolitan counterpart. I’ve always been wary of artists who have tried too hard to have a persona. I viewed it as too much time spent on marketing, and not enough on the art itself. For example, I dislike Dali for this reason, in addition to his fascist sympathies. But I do love Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
The first act has all the trappings of prime Hemingway: lost love, sport-fishing, fist-fighting, motivational speeches, and a certain melancholy, reminiscent of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. It was an absolute pleasure to read, its men were wistful and past their primes, but still hopeful and happy. The protagonist is Thomas Hudson, an artist who has chosen to isolate himself on the island of Bimini, seemingly by ascetic choice, but we come to see that he has many conflicts with the society he once belonged to, and has chosen self-exile. In a novelty for Hemingway, the first part heavily features the protagonist’s children. Perhaps it owes to Hemingway’s own rocky relationship to his children that there aren’t more in his other novels, and perhaps this one is him reflecting on those relationships now. The men in the novel behaved like they were out of The Sun Also Rises, and the action was all The Old Man and the Sea. And then in the second last chapter, after Thomas’ children have left, we find out that they die in a car accident.
The second act depicts man at both a moral low and a morale low. Hudson is in Cuba, recently having found out that his remaining son, the oldest one, and perhaps the one he was the closest to, has died. This information isn’t presented to the reader until halfway through the chapter, when another character finds out. As a man with three sons, I’m not sure why Hemingway chose to kill of the children of a protagonist who is clearly a stand-in for him. Other than the cats who keep him company, he is curt and sarcastic with everyone else in the world. He is an old man living in the past and bitter with the present, recounting tales of old trysts and glory. For me, this was the saddest part of the novel, and I like to imagine it as Hemingway’s “present” as he was writing it: worn out and washed up. This would be The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
The third act is For Whom the Bell Tolls, unashamedly and unreservedly. As a self-declared Fitzgerald-man, this work is not one of my favourites. Perhaps I’ll grow into it. In it, Hudson and a team of sailors are pursuing the survivors of a German U-boat in Cuba. There is action, there is gore, and there is a presumably dead Hudson. Not much more to say on the third part.
What a novel, truly what a novel. Aside from my personal preferences, the tastemakers will also deem the third part is also well-written. And despite my best efforts, it is impossible to separate Hemingway the man from Hemingway the legend. Part of the reason The Sun Also Rises succeeded commercially was that it was a roman à clef, and in the novel, Hemingway clearly writes himself as the protagonist. And in every subsequent novel, he repeats the formula.
In a final touch of irony, my copy of Islands in the Stream has a picture of Hemingway next to a giant marlin on the cover. In real life, Hemingway and the supposed inspiration for Hudson, Henry Strater, had a falling-out owing to another marlin picture. According to Strater’s obituary, Time Magazine published a photo with the two of them and a marlin, with the caption that Hemingway had caught the fish, and Strater never forgave Hemingway. Wouldn’t have expected any less pettiness from the man a Hemingway protagonist was based on.
