When we were in Carmel, I was reading Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August.  An excellent book.  Since we have returned home I finished that book and moved on to The Sun Also Rises.  It's funny--Hemingway, on almost the first page, makes fun of Carmel.  I think that we are supposed, if we are sympatico (yes, I know) with Jake Barnes, to think that Carmel is, well, a wealthy place where people go to exercise pretensions of an artistic nature.