Pont Neuf
This atmospheric and intelligent novel of World War II boasts both insightful glimpses of Martha Gellhorn (Ernest Hemingway’s third wife) and battle scenes to snare both lay readers and military aficionados. The story follows Annie March, a young journalist protégé of Gellhorn, and two Harvard-educated officers, one a battlefield captain, the other in intelligence. Both men fall for Annie. She’s warily impressed by the tough, worldly Gellhorn, who maneuvers her way past misogynist Army rules onto the front lines to cover World War II, to her famous husband’s disgust. “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?” Hemingway wrote her angrily—a telegram that Max Byrd quotes in Pont Neuf.
The quieter, younger, and less confident Annie March discovers she’s not driven to write after all. But when she acquires a camera, she’s found her métier as a photojournalist. In the meantime, Annie’s admirer, the Harvard-educated Captain Shaw, finds himself assigned to fight in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands September 1944 and then the Battle of the Bulge in northeastern France that December. Byrd’s unsentimental combat scenes show how time speeds up and slows down in the midst of attack and death. The men fighting are heroes and cowards in the same skin, just trying to get through.
This slender volume felt epic to me as I was reading it. If you love Alan Furst’s books, I suspect you’ll love Pont Neuf. It’s worth reading just for its gracefully sketched scenes of Annie’s and Shaw’s tentative affair and for Gellhorn and Hemingway’s dysfunctional marriage. It’s when Byrd pivots to writing about Shaw on the battlefield, however, that the novel becomes unputdownable. Recommended.
