Review: Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway

I was in a local book store one day when I found out that John Steinbeck had written his own version of the King Arthur tales. I was overjoyed by this and bought it immediately. This was big news for me – on one side, the King Arthur stories always seemed so rich and exciting (for those of us who grew up on Excalibur), yet translations of Le Morte D’Arthur generally stunk; on the other side, you had one of America’s greatest writers, generally known for his terse and to-the-point prose, widely known for novel-length ideas wrapped up into 100-page books. This sounded too good to be true.

It was too good to be true. Yes, John Steinbeck wrote his version of the King Arthur tales. But he gave up after only a few poorly-written chapters. He never edited them, and he decided not to seek publication for them – they were only published, after his death, because his name was on them. In all, it was a sham.

Remember that as we talk about Islands in the Stream.

Islands in the Stream is the rare book that proves that just because something is well-written does not make it a good story. The book follows a Hemingway avatar named Thomas Hudson across three stories, the first in the 30s with his children visiting him on the island of Bimini, once at the outset of WWII in Havana, and once…immediately afterwards? Shortly afterwards? It doesn’t say, but definitely sometime shortly after the second story, this time hunting for U-boats around Cuba.

This book does have a couple things going for it. One of the main things is an understanding of Hemingway. As noted above, the main character is an avatar of Hemingway (although a painter, not a writer). When you think of Hemingway there are usually two images that come to mind – the dashing, daring adventuring world traveler in his younger days, and the white-bearded slightly-odd legend hiding the sadness that will lead to his self-imposed death. The images are so divergent that they can seem to be completely different people. What Islands in the Stream does right is show what the connective tissue between those two people is: pain. The first story, where Thomas Hudson is a Don Draper-like Difficult Man, is really one long lead-up to a horrifying last-page twist. With that twist in mind, it makes sense that the Thomas Hudson about ten years later that we meet at the beginning of the second story is isolated, caustic, and spends his mornings having conversations with his cats. It’s an amazing self-portrait of Hemingway.

The writing, of course, is also beautiful, if overly long (we’ll get to that). His descriptions of the islands, especially the beaches of Bimini in the first chapter, are captivating.

With that writing, though, the story itself is atypically boring for a Hemingway book. While there are general themes of loss and mortality between the three chapters, they are no more connected than the themes of any two books would be. The growing (or decaying) of Thomas Hudson between the first two books occurs off-screen, and nothing of note in the second chapter, really a series of conversations in a bar, really informs the third chapter – which would be expected since, again, it seems to immediately follow it chronologically.

Also of note, while the language is beautiful, it can be overly long. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the first chapter’s tireless description of one of Thomas Hudson’s sons reeling in a marlin. While Hemingway was an avid fan of sport-fishing, even he should have realized that there’s only so many pages you can devote to a person trying to catch a fish, and this feels like it goes on for at least 50 pages (although I can’t say definitively since I read it on a Kindle). The lack of editing, even self-editing, is apparent.

With that in mind, and confused by the rare miss for Papa (only five out of ten hot dogs, by the way), I did what anyone forming a critical analysis of a Hemingway book would do – I looked it up on Wikipedia. It turns out, while Hemingway wrote all three stories, he did not conceive of it as a book – this was published posthumously. The only reason all three were put together in the first place is because they included Thomas Hudson as the protagonist. Furthermore, the third chapter was originally going to be a completely different story, but they published that one separately, and called it The Old Man and the Sea.

So buyer beware – if you find that your favorite author wrote something that seems too good to be true, do your research first!