Hemingway's Pick

As quoted in Papa Hemingway by his nerdy, worshipful Eckermann, A. E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway considered John Horne Burns' The Gallery "the only truly good novel, maybe great, to come out of World War Two." Hemingway was speaking in 1954, so his elevation of this now almost forgotten novel and writer is simultaneously a harsh criticism of The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, From Here to Eternity, and every other product of the first wave of WWII fiction. Hemingway didn't live long enough to read the second, darkly comic wave defined by Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five and, ultimately, Gravity's Rainbow, but chances are Hem would've despised Heller, Vonnegut and Pynchon even more than he hated James Jones. (It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what a 75 year-old Hemingway might have made of Pynchon's druggy, porny, supersurreal magnum opus. His thoughts might have run along the lines of, "Gertrude would've loved this shit--that bitch!") Anyone wishing to test Hemingway's judgment of the Burns book can take advantage of the fact that the wonderful NYRB Classics imprint has brought it back into print. Grab a copy and read it for yourself.