In 1929 Morley Callaghan and his wife Loretta went to Paris, where they hung out in cafés with writers and artists and rubberneckers and lounge lizards, spent a couple of hilarious evenings with James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle, and eventually Callaghan knocked Hemingway down in the sparring match that entered literary history (Scott Fitzgerald was the timekeeper who forgot to keep time), and which is the central event in Morley Callaghan’s memoir That Summer in Paris (Exile Editions). Callaghan is a good writer and this is a book one wants to read in a single sitting. Its pages are soaked in its time and the narrative is clean and vibrant, marred only by the abuse of the participle that no editor could ever cure him of. He gives us a palpable world, and seeing that world from the perspective of this one is a demonstration of how the present can alter the past. The world then was a boys’ club, a grey place filled with men worried about physical prowess and talking about little else; homophobic and narrow-minded. The men have names and the women, when they are present at all, are wives or girlfriends. This manly stuff is thin gruel and it gets thinner as the years go by. I remember reading this book and others like it (Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was one) when I was a teenager in the sixties; they seemed highly relevant then, and Paris of the twenties seemed like a wonderful place. Today the same Paris of the twenties has grown irrelevant and un-wonderful. Callaghan’s book is wonderful and sad for that very reason; it is certainly not tragic as the dust jacket claims. This is a handsome book, but the publisher has left the proofreading to a spell-check program and the text is littered with typos.