Continuing The New Yorker's series on writers and books their contributors return to "again and again," Brad Leithauser muses on Hemingway's "inherently paradoxical style, calculatedly ungainly, terse, and fluid at once". Despite his criticism of Hemingway's limitations, and too-frequent descent into near self-parody, Leithauser admits his best work is remarkable:
[T]he underpinnings of Hemingway’s style seem especially unpromising. The deep reliance on the most insipid of approbative terms: "nice," "good," "pleasant." The stringing together of phrases with that most colorless of connectives: "and." The limp verbs ("is," "was," "were") and the shameless recycling of "there is" and "there was." The avoidance of most adverbs except the most hackneyed ("suddenly," "incredibly").
The wonder lies in just how extraordinarily full of nuance and verve are the scenes Hemingway can create with such coarse and unlikely tools. He has peerless moments: the harrowing explosion of the mortar shell in "A Farewell to Arms"; the painstaking erecting of a tent in "Big Two-Hearted River"; the repetitions building to a profound unease, and then to a sad resignation more uneasy-making than any unease, in "The Killers"; the astronomically vast dispersals of ocean current and cloud in "The Old Man and the Sea."
Recent Dish coverage of Hemingway here, here, here and here.
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