robertlashley 's review for:

Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway

1.0

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Across The River and Through The Trees, Ernest Hemingway’s fifth novel, was published to a perfect storm of critical derision ( and Justly so). To a generation haunted by war, Hemingway created a colonel who bragged of killing 122. To an era still traumatized by Hiroshima and Dresden, he wrote of war in scenery flowery enough to be obscene. To a culture grappling with the experiences of blacks and Jews, he name checked a confederate general and forgot one of the most significant reasons World War II was fought. It was one of those epic failures that scar a career, the literary equivalent of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait or Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged, something so bad it changed the perception of artist work for the rest of his career.

Even with The Old Man and The Sea, a novella IMO as good as anyone has ever written, Hemingway never regained the place in the public’s consciousness. If Papa had rendered his brand of War fiction lifeless all by his lonesome, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and Tim O Brien killed it dead. The raised consciousness that came from the feminist movement shed more than enough light on his grotesque sexual politics. The explosion of Jewish and African American writers that saw this country from a new set of eyes rendered his heroism, his philosophy, and his prose style all but moot. There were reasons he had to go away, and this book-a portrait of masculinty in it's own filth-is one of them.