Perfect Strangers

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, illness, violence, sexual content, and cursing.

Hemingway is a motif throughout the novel, most fundamentally in the fact that each of the four parts of the novel begins with a Hemingway quote, and the narrative uses him to question stereotypical gender representations, particularly masculinity. In the psychiatric center, Kelly reads Ernest Hemingway to Olivia and concludes, “[B]abe, he was one sad individual. All the obsession with war and death? Blech. And don’t get me started on the whole bullfighting thing. That’s just toxic masculinity, right there” (480). Kelly advances a typical image of Hemingway, whose work regularly reinforces attitudes about gender that modern society finds problematic.

In the Paris reality, Olivia shares Kelly’s view, telling James, “I can’t believe you like Hemingway! He’s so unbearably macho” (113). As an assertive assassin, James, too, is “macho,” but his characterization undercuts the assumptions about the stereotype. When he and Olivia have sex, he always ensures her consent. Once Olivia becomes pregnant, James further disrupts these gender norms by hinting that he’d like to be the parent who stays home. More so, the repeated Hemingway quote—“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.