Is this all these people do?

[I owe a post on The Hours so that should be coming soon, but I wanted to vent some frustration first.]

Ok so now we are a week into reading The Sun Also Rises, we have read 12 chapters and over half of the book in terns of page numbers. And still the characters have done nothing but drink, ride around in taxis to the next cafe, drink, complain about each other, drink, spend some money, drink, take taxis to their hotel room, drink, and then drink some more. Seriously, is this all they do?!

Don't these people have jobs? Jake is the only one we see doing anything resembling work, and his "work" seems to allow him time to bum around cafes all day and go to Spain to fish. Most of the people are ostensibly writers, but we never see them writing or even talking about their writing. When Jake wants to find them, he just goes around all the cafes until he finds them. He knows they'll be in one of them. Then they party it up till late at night and get so drunk they can't remember appointments they'd made for the next day. Jake seems like the only one who exercises any restraint and has responsibilities. None of these people seem to have any schedule, and so they can just take vacations on a whim.

Which brings me to my next question: where do they get all the money for this? They order incredible amounts of alcohol, ride around in a bunch of taxis, stay in hotel rooms, and travel to Spain. Michael seems to have some kinds of worries about money so he doesn't know if he and Brett can go fishing in Spain, but still. These people are supposed to write books for a living, they can't be that rich.

Bill Gordon says as much to Jake in the reading for this weekend. "You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the sail. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You're an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes" (120). Bill nails it in just a few sentences. To which Jake replies, "It sounds like a swell life" (120).

Here is where I disagree. Nothing about the expatriate Parisian life seems "swell." Everyone we meet here sounds miserable. Jake is miserable, Cohn is miserable, Frances is miserable, Brett says she's miserable. Michael escapes this, but it seems like he is just too dense to understand what is going on. No one seems like they are having much fun (except for when the count is around) and a lot of their socializing seems to be gossiping and complaining about whoever isn't there. They don't really trust each other. They don't seem to do anything meaningful.

This lies in stark contrast to the other Hemingway book I've read, The Old Man and the Sea, which was a story of a character actually going out and doing real work, facing real challenges beyond what he created for himself. I can only hope they characters in The Sun Also Rises will start doing something besides drinking and spending mysterious money in the second half of the book. My hopes are not especially high though, as even a change of scenery to Spain and the concrete activity of fishing cannot keep these people from drinking multiple bottles of wine a day.