F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend’s copy of Tender Is the Night, “If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.” Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental … and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness.
In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.
Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald’s novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife’s derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver’s downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald’s own fate.
F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel’s lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps its author’s most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan’s words, it raised him to the heights of “a modern Orpheus.”
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In a 1934 book review of Tender Is the Night, the reviewer states, “Fitzgerald’s ideas were solid. His books were a little more convoluted.” Some have attributed this to the long intervals while writing the piece; the novel finally completed nine years after its conception.
Set predominantly on the French Riviera, Fitzgerald introduces Dick Diver, the protagonist and a promising psychiatrist, who awakens one day to discover his best years behind him and that he resents his wife/patient for stealing his prime. Chasing the illusion of youth, in this case Rosemary—a young starlet with the emotional depth of an Oscar statue, Dick finally plays his hand only to discover Rosemary is no longer in the game.
Ironically, it’s his fractured schizophrenic wife, Nicole, who realizes his predicament and makes the difficult decision to abandon him, hoping it’s not too late for Dick to get his life back on track. Dedicated fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald can’t help but wonder if art does indeed imitate life as his own wife Zelda battled schizophrenia.
Much like his main characters’ tendency to wall-up their emotions and reveal only the best of themselves, Fitzgerald’s writing implies a reluctance to commit wholly to the novel. Perhaps it was too painful or, like Dick, he was uncertain as to which path to follow.
That’s not to say Tender Is the Night is not a literary triumph. Few writers can excel like Fitzgerald—even fewer paint such a vivid picture with merely words or orchestrate such haunting lyricism.
Masterpiece
I love this novel and find it fascinating that Fitzgerald tinkered with placing the books in reverse order. A snapshot of a very specific era.
Fitzgerald always writes beautifully, and this story, with the personal connection, it not only depicts the era but also the tragedy of being trapped in a situation that you can’t control. A sad but gorgeous story.
It is a book of its time and our time. Its timelessness is part of what makes this classic a must read for writers today. The character development is exceptional. The dynamic between characters unparalleled. The narcissism, subtle and spot-on. Autobiographical fiction of Scott and Zelda? Of course! Like The Great Gatsby, this is another tale of triangles between broken, needy people looking for their raison d’etre. I like my books dark and tragic and this one fits the bill perfectly. It is beautifully written. My version is not linear. It begins on the Riviera when Rosemary meets the glamorous Dick and Nicole Diver, which to me provided a quick hook. I didn’t see any reason for the linear rewrite.
I admit, I may have approached this book with a certain apprehension. After my unpleasant experience with D H Lawrence, and also being a self-proclaimed critic of the Modernists in general (even you, Virginia Woolf, even you), I wasn’t too keen on starting this one. Truth is, I really should have been.
Tender is the Night is, at first, a little creepy, if you’re familiar with Fitzgerald and his married life. His wife, Zelda, was schizophrenic, and made his life a living hell. The poor guy did the only thing he knew he could do and wrote about it to deal with the stress, immortalizing her as the turbulent, mad Nicole Diver. All well and good there, kind of creepily autobiographical, but it’s fine.
But then there’s an extra layer of creepy because holy shit wait her husband used to be her therapist??????
Isn’t this why we have ethical laws?!
The premise of the story is simple enough: Dick Diver, married to Nicole, is in an unhappy marriage with a woman who is incredibly mentally ill. Dick, who seems to have a serious thing for younger women, has an affair with a film star who’s only just turned eighteen. The rest of the story is the deterioration of both Dick and his marriage, as Nicole somehow seems to come out of the whole thing stronger. As one of my old literature professors used to say, Dick is a diver, he goes down, while Nicole goes up. She’s like a parasite, taking all his happiness from him to fuel her own life.
The novel is easy to read and follow, a stark difference from Women in Love, which you will all remember I actually despised. The characters might not be incredibly likable, but they’re very real characters with very real worries. I loved reading this, immersing myself into the world of 1920s psychology and the upper class worries of the time. By the end of the book, I was almost sad to see the characters go, which speaks volumes about the way Fitzgerald can write a believable and likable cast of characters.
Kudos there, mate.
Final rating: 4/5. Any literature nerd has to read this.