Ernest Hemingway’s tremendous fame rests upon his acclaim as a writer and his status as a world celebrity, a celebrity that itself rests upon his eventful life, which furnished the subjects of his art. Works such as Islands in the Stream have an autobiographical basis; for example, Hemingway himself actually engaged in such quixotic and, in his case, fruitless exploits as German U-boat hunting during World War II. His best-known fiction includes highly wrought short stories such as “The Killers” (1927), “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1926), and “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) and longer stories such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936). Widely read and often translated novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway’s artistic influence stems from his often violent subjects (war and sport), his terse and disciplined style (concentrated and laconic), and his attitudes and values (including famously celebrating the “grace under pressure” of stoic characters).

By most accounts, Hemingway’s greatest literary achievements fall early in his career. Many critics find his later works less original and inspired, more mannered and self-imitative. All of his most admired works were written before the United States entered World War II in 1941, twenty years before the author’s death in 1961. After 1941, Hemingway’s most universally acclaimed work—specifically mentioned in the citation for his 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature—was The Old Man and the Sea (1952). (David’s soreness, severe abrasions, and persistence in trying to land the prize swordfish during the fishing scene parallel the experience of Santiago as he battles the great marlin in The Old Man and the Sea.) In the mid-1940’s Hemingway spoke of a major work encompassing air, land, and sea. He worked on the project on and off well into the 1950’s, publishing The Old Man and the Sea separately in 1952. Other stories, such as “The Strange Country” (1987) and the narratives that became Islands in the Stream, were part of this grand scheme.

As Hemingway worked on the manuscript of his grand narrative, he sometimes called three of the interrelated stories “The Sea When Young,” “The Sea When Absent,” and “The Sea in Being.” The posthumously published Islands in the Stream comprises sections titled “Bimini,” “Cuba,” and “At Sea.” The title of the book as a whole—whether or not it was the author’s final choice—suggests a haven, but also isolation in a stream of time. (The title therefore contrasts to the more characteristically 1930’s title of For Whom the Bell Tolls: Hemingway drew the latter phrase from a John Donne sermon that posited that “no man is an island,” because all are communal parts of the mainland.) Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, and the publisher Charles Scribner, Jr., organized and edited Islands in the Stream for its 1970 publication.

Islands in the Stream is a novel about relinquishment. The protagonist, Thomas Hudson, faces losses and confusions as he struggles to find meaning and stability in his life. His loves—the women in his life, his family, his art, his conception of duty—each become a subject of his concern. All that had once been added to his life is now being subtracted. He can only remember his loves, and, when his first wife reappears, he realizes that their relationship cannot succeed in the present. He loses each of his three sons. By the third section of the novel, little mention is made of Hudson’s painting. In the final chapters of the book, Hudson acts out his notion of duty, desperate for meaningful action (as opposed to meaningless inaction), despite his often...