In his moving debut novel, The Broken Places, Russell Franklin tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s youngest child, who was known variously as Gregory or Gloria, and lived from 1931–2001. From the tumultuous ’30s to the end of the 20th century, the reader is taken on a serpentine journey, punctuated by rejection and resilience, despair and hope. Like any good Hemingway hero, Gregory travelled the world, hunting and fishing, and like Ernest himself, they were diagnosed with manic depression. (They diverged in becoming a doctor, not a full-time writer, though the family illness of alcoholism would eventually cost them their medical licence.)
The Broken Places wears its extensive biographical research lightly. Papa himself is a side-character here, though his mythos casts a long shadow. He’s depicted telling his children how to be men: he’s temperamental, often angry, but occasionally gentle and kind. Franklin doesn’t shy away from a father whom the real Gregory labelled a “gin-soaked, abusive monster”, nor from affording him sparks of humanity. The transformations between Gregory and Gloria over the years are handled with equal care: as with the titular character of Virginia Woolf’s sex-swapping tale Orlando, this young Hemingway moves from “he” to “she” effortlessly, and if “Gregory” dominates much of the narrative, you can feel the pulse of “Gloria” throughout, haunting the male pronoun and beating between the lines.
Though Gregory, for the most part, tries to repress or contain the Gloria within, there’s a late glimmer of hope when their eyes land on the newly released The Garden of Eden, a controversial, posthumous 1986 novel by their father, in which characters experiment with gender fluidity. Gloria then resurfaces, realising that it didn’t matter whether Ernest had understood them or not. Gregory’s brain rewrites and retells their existence as they scour through their memories, so the reader is given a fragmented narrative, masterfully representing the inner world of someone who has gone through several electroshock treatments – and whose mind now roams between locations, times and identities.
Throughout The Broken Places, Franklin’s prose is contained and concise: no rambling sentences, no streams of consciousness. This was a favourite trick of Ernest Hemingway’s, too: deceptively simple writing that turns assumptions on their heads, and provokes questions about the fixity of selfhood. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? And what about all the lives in between?
The Broken Places is published by Phoenix at £18.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
