The best of [Hemingway's] critics recognized that though he dealt with a limited range of characters, placed them in quite similar circumstances, measured them against an unvarying code, and rendered them in a style that epitomized these other limitations, it was precisely this ruthless economy that gave his writing its power. And when Hemingway himself commented on his aims, it was clear that he knew what he was doing. He knowingly restricted himself in order to strip down, compress, and energize his writing. Prose, he once said, is not interior decoration but architecture, and the Baroque is over. His best work stands as a striking application to writing of Mies van der Rohe's architectural maxim: "Less is more."

On the other hand, Hemingway's detractors, many of whom are well-qualified, have doggedly insisted—and sometimes with a certain logic—that less is simply less: Hemingway is too limited, they...