To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is not Hemingway’s best work.
The biggest problem is that he doesn’t have a good enough reason for switching characters. When your main character is seriously wounded, we want to know what happens next. It’s very irritating when you switch to some other character for no good reason. And even worse when your reason is transparently political.
It started feeling like a hard-boiled detective novel. Yes, we know smuggling is dangerous. No, even at the high of prohibition it couldn’t have been the murder-fest depicted here. Not every job ended with blood in the water. But if it’s a noir detective story, that’s okay. The various unrealistic excesses are forgivable in that context.
Then it becomes clear that there’s no overarching conspiracy to dismantle. No Maltese Falcon to find.
The best part of the book happens during one of the digressions that hurt the narrative so much. We’ve followed some random character to some random bar. He has nothing to do with the story. Oh, wait, the main character’s wife passes him on the road at the end. But who cares? Anyway, this guy goes to this bar and sees one drunk smashing another drunk’s head into the sidewalk. The random character and a police officer break up the fight. Then one of the drunks ask the police officer for a dollar.
Anyway. To Have and Have Not either lacks Hemingway’s classic subtlety and style, or I’m not wise enough to detect it. There are a few good jokes and character sketches. Far more racial slurs than I’m comfortable reading. A mangled plot and a transparent political bent that doesn’t feel like Hemingway at all.
I’d almost say it’s like an imitation Hemingway novel, and the author hasn’t read Hemingway. Only bad reviews of Hemingway. Maybe this is the novel that’s the foundation for all those bad reviews.
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