Tender Is the Night (Cover May Vary)
A modern classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with an introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling author Amor Towles and a foreword by Fitzgerald's great-granddaughter Blake Hazard.
Set in the south of France in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tale of a young American actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and her complicated relationship with the alluring couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth pushed him into a glamorous lifestyle, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s decline.
Lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked about books when it was originally published in 1934 and is even more beloved by readers today.
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Community Reviews
This one is better than This Side of Paradise, but not as good as The Great Gatsby. It has more focus than the former, but is nowhere near as focused as the latter.
The story is told a little out of order to create a specific pattern of perspective on the book's main character, Dick Diver. Yes, you read that right. The name is ridiculous to our ears but I don't think it was at the time. Any way, we first meet him through the eyes of a young Hollywood starlet. Dick appears to be this high emotional intelligence, super interesting and insightful guy. Then we see him through his own eyes in Book 2. Then we see him mostly through one of his psychiatric patients, who he has married, as his life starts to unravel. This perspective evolution is supposed to parallel the role of America in the world from just after WWI up to the crash of 1929. At least, that's what I've read - I have to say that although I've studied the interwar period quite a bit, I was very focused on Britain, not the continent or the US, so I don't know how closely it really tracks things.
In that quick summary you will notice at least one fairly problematic situation - a psychiatrist falling in love with and marrying his own patient. The novel doesn't trivialize it, but it also doesn't approach this thorny issue with a full dramatization of the potential downsides.
As for the experience of reading it - Fitzgerald can write some amazing prose. He can also be very confusing. My edition did not have notes. I really, really wish it had. There were a number of points where I had to do some serious digging to figure out what was being said / going on because, without a footnote to draw my attention, it wasn't clear that I was even missing a reference. There's plenty of slang too that I had never heard before. Just a number of places where I was just frustrated. Actually, although I am not a huge fan of AI, I did find that just pasting a whole paragraph (copied from an epub) in and asking what is being talked about helped a lot. I only had to do it 3 or 4 times, but without that or footnotes I would not have known what was going on in that paragraph. Just an example:
"In some moods he griped at his own reasoning: Could I help it that Pete Livingstone sat in the locker-room Tap Day when everybody looked all over hell for him? And I got an election when otherwise I wouldn’t have got Elihu, knowing so few men. He was good and right and I ought to have sat in the locker-room instead. Maybe I would, if I’d thought I had a chance at an election. But Mercer kept coming to my room all those weeks. I guess I knew I had a chance all right, all right. But it would have served me right if I’d swallowed my pin in the shower and set up a conflict."
Keep in mind that none of the proper nouns in that passage had been mentioned before. No set up in context. Just a whole situation the character is remembering, but it's not clear that it is a memory from a long time ago, not clear what Tap Day is, why there's an election, what pin, who is Elihu, who is Pete, Mercer, why does any of this matter ... etc. And nothing in the book itself to tell you. So I had to google all of it. Tap Day is when secret societies at Yale "tap" newbies they want to "elect" into the club, at which point they give them a "pin" to signify it. Pete Livingstone was the primary choice, but no one could find him, so they tapped Dick instead, and he feels guilty because he should have known he was being looked at and that Pete deserved it more, because Dick is a super-selfless guy, which is what the whole incident is supposed to demonstrate. But how can it if you don't explain any of the references?
Any way, the novel actually has quite a few funny moments with varying degrees of irony.
There's a number of seemingly artificially inserted melodramatic moments of violence, too. They kind of have importance to the characters though - they are all broadly symbolic, but they don't actually affect much of the plot. So, in a sense, there's a whole lot of nothing happening, and stretches can get boring, especially in the first 4 or 5 chapters, and later in the middle of book 2, but it wasn't as bad as I feared based on the synopsis.
Any way, it's good, but not that special.
The story is told a little out of order to create a specific pattern of perspective on the book's main character, Dick Diver. Yes, you read that right. The name is ridiculous to our ears but I don't think it was at the time. Any way, we first meet him through the eyes of a young Hollywood starlet. Dick appears to be this high emotional intelligence, super interesting and insightful guy. Then we see him through his own eyes in Book 2. Then we see him mostly through one of his psychiatric patients, who he has married, as his life starts to unravel. This perspective evolution is supposed to parallel the role of America in the world from just after WWI up to the crash of 1929. At least, that's what I've read - I have to say that although I've studied the interwar period quite a bit, I was very focused on Britain, not the continent or the US, so I don't know how closely it really tracks things.
In that quick summary you will notice at least one fairly problematic situation - a psychiatrist falling in love with and marrying his own patient. The novel doesn't trivialize it, but it also doesn't approach this thorny issue with a full dramatization of the potential downsides.
As for the experience of reading it - Fitzgerald can write some amazing prose. He can also be very confusing. My edition did not have notes. I really, really wish it had. There were a number of points where I had to do some serious digging to figure out what was being said / going on because, without a footnote to draw my attention, it wasn't clear that I was even missing a reference. There's plenty of slang too that I had never heard before. Just a number of places where I was just frustrated. Actually, although I am not a huge fan of AI, I did find that just pasting a whole paragraph (copied from an epub) in and asking what is being talked about helped a lot. I only had to do it 3 or 4 times, but without that or footnotes I would not have known what was going on in that paragraph. Just an example:
"In some moods he griped at his own reasoning: Could I help it that Pete Livingstone sat in the locker-room Tap Day when everybody looked all over hell for him? And I got an election when otherwise I wouldn’t have got Elihu, knowing so few men. He was good and right and I ought to have sat in the locker-room instead. Maybe I would, if I’d thought I had a chance at an election. But Mercer kept coming to my room all those weeks. I guess I knew I had a chance all right, all right. But it would have served me right if I’d swallowed my pin in the shower and set up a conflict."
Keep in mind that none of the proper nouns in that passage had been mentioned before. No set up in context. Just a whole situation the character is remembering, but it's not clear that it is a memory from a long time ago, not clear what Tap Day is, why there's an election, what pin, who is Elihu, who is Pete, Mercer, why does any of this matter ... etc. And nothing in the book itself to tell you. So I had to google all of it. Tap Day is when secret societies at Yale "tap" newbies they want to "elect" into the club, at which point they give them a "pin" to signify it. Pete Livingstone was the primary choice, but no one could find him, so they tapped Dick instead, and he feels guilty because he should have known he was being looked at and that Pete deserved it more, because Dick is a super-selfless guy, which is what the whole incident is supposed to demonstrate. But how can it if you don't explain any of the references?
Any way, the novel actually has quite a few funny moments with varying degrees of irony.
There's a number of seemingly artificially inserted melodramatic moments of violence, too. They kind of have importance to the characters though - they are all broadly symbolic, but they don't actually affect much of the plot. So, in a sense, there's a whole lot of nothing happening, and stretches can get boring, especially in the first 4 or 5 chapters, and later in the middle of book 2, but it wasn't as bad as I feared based on the synopsis.
Any way, it's good, but not that special.
Fitzgerald always does a wonderful job of romanticizing being an expat in exuberant European countries. Too bad the 20s of this century aren't as roaring and glamourous as the 20s of last century, or else I'd be bopping around the French Riviera with no real job too. Dick Diver is a puke of a human, and Nicole deserves all the happiness in the world. This book read like a bleak and tragic soap opera to me, while using all the most beautiful language. I loved this quote:
"I can remember how I stood waiting for you in the garden— holding all my self in my arms like a basket of flowers. It was that to me anyhow— I thought I was sweet— waiting to hand that basket to you."
This was good, but not so great. It was really hard to read but I'm proud of myself that I did it. I really felt for some of the characters. I loved the writing style and how something so deep and with so much emotion was said so simply. That's probably what I'll remember most.
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Just bought this for $4.00 at Strand Books!
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Just bought this for $4.00 at Strand Books!
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