I went to Paris for the hunger and stayed for the score-settling, which is nobody's idea of a holiday.

My profile here quotes Hemingway, so take everything below with whatever quantity of salt you feel is appropriate. The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. I have had that sentence taped inside a kitchen cupboard for eleven years. So I came to this one with my hat already off and in my hand.

And there are twenty pages in here as good as anything I've read. The hunger chapter. Walking the long way round to the Luxembourg Gardens so as not to go past the bakeries, then going in to look at the Cezannes on an empty stomach because hunger made the colours louder and the shapes stand up. That is the truest thing in the book and possibly the truest thing he ever wrote about art, and I read it three times on the trot in a Travelodge in Sheffield, which is not Paris, but you take what you are given.

The false spring. The horses at Auteuil. Sylvia Beach lending him books on trust when he had no money at all, and the goats being driven down the street in the morning with their bells going. He gets Paris the way you get a person, not the way you get a postcard; the city in this book has weather and smells and rent arrears. Sentence for sentence he is still the best plain writer of his century and it is not particularly close.

So why only a seven, then?

Because the second half turns into a settling of accounts, and an old man settling accounts with the dead is not a nice thing to watch. What he does to Fitzgerald across three chapters is genuinely mean. The business in the hotel bathroom is the sort of story you tell in a bar at midnight and regret at nine the next morning, and here it is in print, forever, about a friend who could not answer back because he had been dead for twenty years. Zelda comes off worse still — much worse. Ford Madox Ford is written up as a smell. Gertrude Stein, who fed him and taught him and stood him in front of the pictures, is repaid with a scene overheard through a doorway that he did not need to put in, and that reads to me like a man kicking over a lamp on his way out of a house where he was once made welcome.

And underneath all of it runs a thin sad current of self-justification about the end of his first marriage, which he half admits to and half blames on rich people drifting into their lives like a fog. Nobody made you, Ernest. That is the Truth of it, and he will not quite look at it straight; he writes around it in those beautiful clean sentences, and the beautiful clean sentences are a magician's other hand, drawing the eye off.

I also have to admit that I do not entirely know what I read. It was assembled after he died, out of notebooks, by other people, and there are at least two competing versions of it in the world with the chapters in different orders. Mine was a charity shop paperback with the spine gone and somebody's shopping list in the back, and I have since been informed, by a man in our Tuesday group who owns a first edition of everything, that mine is the wrong edition. Fine. It cost two pounds.

If you have never read him, please do not start here. Start with the stories. Start with Big Two-Hearted River, the burnt-over country and the trout holding steady in the current, and come to this one much later, when you already love him enough to forgive him a bit.

I have thought a great deal this month about whether a book gets to be less good because the man inside it behaves badly, and I have no answer, and I am suspicious of anybody who has one ready to go. What I know is that I closed it feeling slightly worse about somebody I admire, and that the hunger chapter is still up there in the cupboard of my head with the tape and the yellowing paper.

Seven. Read the good bits twice. Skip the chapter about Fitzgerald in the bathroom, honestly, it is beneath everyone including the reader.