Adam Gopnik at LitHub:
To encounter Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises as a first-time reader now is to wander into surprising areas of sometimes dubious prejudice and often dated bigotries. The first sentences, about the writer Robert Cohn, have a tang of anti-Semitism, one that only becomes stronger later on as the narrator draws the reader into a shared understanding that there is something absurd and overcompensating about a Jewish Ivy League boxer. Nor are many subsequent pages—with their slighting references to gay men, and with the normal sexual appetite of the heroine regarded as a slightly undignified affliction—entirely to contemporary taste. Against that other mighty pillar of 1920s literature, The Great Gatsby—though doubtless we have at times romanticized there what is in fact a brutal American parable of self-making and violence and gangsterism—The Sun Also Rises offers some barbed wire and thorns in the perimeter of its effects, ones that must be leapt past and over.
more here.
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