Tender is the Night (Collins Classics)

This story had some great moments but not enough to pull me in.

Wow, this book was haunting.

I'll never know how Fitzgerald makes the bourgeois so sympathizable. I really felt for both Divers, and found Rosemary quite interesting in the first half. And the side characters, oh lord!

Rich, haunting, maybe a tad self-confessional. The Jazz Age makes me ache.

I hate it when I don't "get" classics. I read them. I understand the words, but I don't "get" them.That's the way I felt with Tender is the Night. The story starts in post-war France with Dick and Nicole Diver playing the Don and Betty roles from Mad Men. Terribly sophisticated, the toast of the town, but with a past. At a certain point there is "an episode" and the story then flashes back for awhile to explain how Dick and Nicole had arrived at that point in time. Without giving away too much of the story, it appears that Dick had rescued Nicole.The present day story then continues as the Diver's marriage crumbles and Dick himself needs rescuing, but it's not to be.As I read this story I kept going back to the episode at the end of the first of the three parts. I don't understand how this incident caused Nicole to relapse. It seemed so random. The same thing is true of Dick's self-destruction in the last third of the book. What was that all about? You were so perfect, you two! Get over yourselves. My verdict: I think I need more sympathy for people, but I really didn't like this book much at all.

I think I need to re-read this. I don't know if I'll like it anymore the next time that I do, but I barely remember it.

The novel tells the story of the Nicole and Dick Diver, a wealthy, American couple living in Europe in the early 20th century. As the story opens they are introduced to a young movie actress, Rosemary, who is infatuated with Dick and with the lifestyle the Divers and their friends enjoy. Slowly Rosemary, and the reader, watches the Divers’ marriage disintegrate, and Dick, in particular, descend into alcoholic despair.

There is no question that Fitzgerald could write brilliantly. It is a complex and thought-provoking look at human failing, at fear and weakness, and at self-destruction. However, I could not stand any of the characters, and really did not care what happened to them. Maybe it’s his focus on this very hedonistic lifestyle. This is not the first work by Fitzgerald I’ve read and I’ve had a similar reaction in the past. I’ve also read books by other authors who shone a bright light on a wealthy class – Edith Wharton for example – without feeling that same disconnection with their characters or complete distaste for their lifestyle. I give it 4 stars based on the strength of Fitzgerald’s writing; it is full of exquisitely crafted passages which simply took my breath away.

Trevor White does a wonderful job of performing the audio book. His pacing and voice inflection breathed life into the characters.

If I had to read this back in high school, I would have had an F for sure. The urge to stop reading it was particularly strong – liked none of the characters, can’t decide the purpose of a few others, and can’t identify the correlation to the main story for several the plot lines, side stories. My 2 cents: Part 1 needs sizable editing. Part 2 was strong. Part 3 could use a slight trim. Written in a non-chronological order, we piece together the story of Dick Diver, a psychologist, and his wife, Nicole Warren, an extremely wealthy heiress who due to a childhood trauma (a page that caused me to sit up straight) was a beautiful yet mentally unstable youth when she met Dr. Diver – her doctor who eventually became her husband. On the surface, the duo lived vivaciously amongst the rich and famous along the Riviera, while underneath, the burden of being both husband and doctor wears on Dick as well as on their marriage. Enter Rosemary, an 18 year old budding movie star, who found the charismatic Dick appealing, while her beauty and youth easily hooked Dick. A host of side characters and an abundance of alcohol (mostly for Dick) later, both Nicole and Rosemary are coming into their own, while Dick is aging out of relevance. Like many of the older stories (published in 1934), I find many passages and phrases to be delightful and lyrical. The story itself though irritated me at times. I almost feel bad making negative comments on this book as the subject matter mirrored bits of FSF’s real life – his wife’s medical challenges and their mingling amongst the wealthy in the Riviera. I didn’t understand Dick’s flirting, his inability to commit, and his surrender. Also, both Nicole and Rosemary had “daddy issues”. It was too easy that Dick stepped in as the fatherly lover. And geez, Rosemary, the virgin, slept with Dick just because he was important to her but she knew she didn’t love him the same way anymore. And they have a 16 year age difference! Sigh, I’m going to stop now. Some quotes:On heartache:“She looked up at him as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him; she saw his hand fall on the doorknob. Then she gave up and sank back on the bed. When the door closed she got up and went to the mirror, where she began brushing her hair, sniffling a little. One hundred and fifty strokes Rosemary gave it, as usual, then a hundred and fifty more. She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing…”On love – the discovery and acceptance:“Again the names – then they lurched together as if the taxi had swung them. Her breasts crushed flat against him, her mouth was all new and warm, owned in common. They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast…They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pur accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other…”On love – first kiss:“…As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.”On failure – reminds me of the battle vs. war comparison:“…you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”On hope:“Nicole’s world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on. Was it an hour ago she hdd waited by the entrance, wearing her hope like a corsage at her belt?”On love – the linger feeling:“He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.”On love – the memory of it:“Walking in the garden when it was quite dark he thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self. He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.’”On love – the reunion and age difference:“He guessed that she had had lovers and had loved them in the last four years. Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged – the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve the relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him. He tried to collect all that might attract her – it was less than it had been four years ago. Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.”

The many lives and livers that were ruined - this is a bleak house indeed! A shrink marries his patient and then starts going down hill [himself]. Fitzgerald's "star is born" and then gets saturated in alcohol. A less patient reader might advise the physician to either heal himself or put an end to it all.

Not so great a story as Gatsby, though still a great exercise of style. Emotionally intense, with typically flawed Fitzgeraldian characters and a superb depiction of mental illness.

I listened to the audiobook version, since my paper copy is buried behind double-stacked books.

GLBT tag for a queer male couple, queer psychiatric patients, and various levels of both homophobia and acceptance, per individual characters.

Gender Politics tag for an interesting take on women using financial and social power in particular ways, while men use their power in different ways entirely. Much of the story deals with female characters becoming independent.

Warnings for racism and bigotry typical of privileged white people in the 1920s.

I watched a lovely interview with Ray Bradbury where he declared that this is his favorite novel and he rereads it every year and always discovers something new in it, despite him being in his 80s now. It took me listening to the audiobook version to get past the opening chapter, but I'm glad I did. It really took me getting through the entire first section (where I was full of "Oh honey, no") to completely hook me, although that was mainly due to my own impatience with Rosemary's innocence.

Reaching the end, I just sort of want to hug them all.

However, I really hate the summary given for this novel, which implies that it's all Nicole's fault that Dick's life falls apart, as if she magically forced his complete and persistent ethical failures upon him. Fitzgerald's narration NEVER tries to lay the blame for Dick's choices on Nicole. His foibles are all on Dick, for better or worse, beginning to end. As they should be.

I had seen a tv series after this book a long time ago, and that series left a good impression with me. Now, many years later, I have read the book, and I must say that it disappointed me. The story simply could not grip me and I even had some difficulty in finishing the book. The three stars I gave are also baded on my impression by the tv series. For the book only I would probably just give two stars.

Diese deutsche Übersetzung "folgt der ursprünglichen Fassung von 1934. Die 1982 bei Diogenes ebenfalls unter dem Titel "Zärtlich ist die Nacht" erschienene Ausgabe beruhte auf einer 1951 bei Charles Scribner's Sons postum herausgegebenen Fassung."

A complex soap opera filled with unsavory, wealthy, dysfunctional characters.

The novel opens with a beautiful young women, Rosemary Hoyt, surrounded by a group of acquaintances on the French Riviera. Though very beautiful, filled with superficially attractive people, this opening seemed to me to be drawn out and slow as Rosemary soon meets the Divers, Nicole and Dick, who will become the central interest of the story for much of the rest of the novel. After this somewhat meandering start I was not really impressed with the story until the beginning of Book Two when the novel flashes back to 1917 and the arrival of twenty-six year old Doctor Richard Diver in Zurich. Thus begins the story of the psychiatrist and his wife, Nicole, and eventually Rosemary, a special friend among others. To the extent that the novel has any core story to hold it together it is here in Book Two and in the Third and final section of the novel. Nicole and Dick come to life as real characters, but the other characters in the novel do not share their strength of character. The identities of too many of the people who wander in and out of the story seem in flux, hard to pin down and harder to remember. Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, is a good example of one character for whom this was true.Undoubtedly the novel's greatest asset is Fitzgerald's prose style which can be dazzling with colors and detail descriptions like that of the Riviera that opens the book. The plot begins with Rosemary's infatuation over Dick. "For a moment now she was beside Dick Diver on the path. Alongside his hard, neat brightness everything faded into the surety that he knew everything."(p 31) That Diver was married, sometimes happily, was not an obstacle to her erotic bliss. It is only later in the story that the complexities of Nicole and Dick come to the foreground and ultimately his personal destructiveness combines with her insecurities to determine the direction of their relationship. The deterioration of their relationship can be seen in the influence that her money (Nicole was immensely wealthy) had on Dick's life and feelings. "Living rather ascetically . . . he maintained a qualified financial independence. After a certain point, though, it was difficult--again and again it was necessary to decide together as to the uses to which Nicole's money should be put. Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to stand still forever, encouraged any slackness on his part, and in multiplying ways he was constantly inundated by a trickling of goods and money. . . It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole's problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work."(p 170) And on and on, Dick's guilt and rationalizations gradually contributed to a wall that divided them and grew larger as Dick drank more and spent more time with Rosemary.Fitzgerald spent several years working on the novel. That plus its ultimate serialization in Scribner's Magazine may be part of what seems a sort of disconnectedness. There are also his own personal difficulties with drunkenness, his wife Zelda's insanity, the breakdown of his marriage, and his own personal anger at the burden of these situations. All of this is mirrored in the fictional account of Dick and Nicole, with Dick somewhat unsuccessfully becoming his wife's psychiatrist. Ultimately the novel becomes a comic tragedy in the modern sense. Its brilliant moments make it interesting reading that is only slightly marred by flaws of character and identity.

Brilliant and heartbreaking, with the sort of lush romantic prose that makes a fella swoon about the 1930s. I know Fiztgerald was always disturbed by the lack of response to this book, and tried to move adult middle section to the start of the novel to compensate for what he esteemed as a failing of structure, not style. This section, a long telling of the early days of Dick Diver's relationship with his wife Nicole, adds a lot of backstory but very little else. The novel, until that point, had been a chronicle of Dick's slow deterioration and his estrangement from the woman he loves and serves as a sort of perpetual doctor, and the middle section of the novel just grinds to a halt. This section was just comparatively dull, and I'm not sure moving these 80ish pages to the start would remedy the novel's pacing issues.

Still, beautiful and sublime, though more bloated in style and context than Gatsby. If not for the unfortunate middle section, it would have been a 5 (a lot of modernist novels suffer from these long digressions---Faulner's The Hamlet, for instance, begins like a house fire and peters off into a dull discussion of mules after 200 pages).

After rereading Gatsby for the umpteenth time, I have to say that it is superior to _Tender Is the Night_, if only because it comes as close as any novel I have read to being the "Great American Novel". _Tender_ is more autobiographical, and for this reason the reader can get lost in the particulars, focusing more on the details of time and place while losing the thematic big picutre.

I tried to give F. Scott Fitzgerald a second chance and I didn't like this book either. I can see the skill in his writing. But the book is about shallow vain people who live shallow empty lives. I don't understand Rosemary's mother. She encourages her daughter to pursue a married man. She sends her not yet 18 year old daughter off to travel with a married man that Rosemary says she is in love with.Dick's "friend" is in serious trouble. And his only reaction is annoyance at the inconvenience to him.It was interesting to see him sign his name as Dicole - for Dick and Nicole. The name combining for couples has been around longer than I thought.

If you have ever wondered what it was like to roam with the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways and the Murphys in the 1920s, this book provides a good sense of what it must have been like. Only semi-autobiographial, of course, it is a book less about events than about how men and women can inflict emotional pain on one another. It also suggests a way out of that pain: think independently of the social norms others want to enforce. When Nicole is finally able to do that for herself, Dick sacrifices himself and walks away. Along the way he's made a complete hash out of his life so his leaving falls flat as a noble gesture, but he's made a complete hash out of it because he was never true to himself. There's always the shadow that he married Nicole for her money, even though that doesn't seem to be true. His life is made up of fighting these shadows and he never got clear of them. It's definitely an uneven book, but the language can be gorgeous and so unlike Hemingway's.

This one was a slog for me and a bit of a hot mess in my opinion. The low rating is because of the writing style by F. Scott Fitzgerald and not content related. I was disappointed because I so badly wanted to like it. Every time I felt a glimpse of hope throughout the novel, I was let down.

Fantastic book.

This is one of those books where it's hard to say you actually enjoy reading it, but by the end, you're glad that you did. None of the characters are likable or even sympathetic, but their behaviors really make you think and want to discuss the book with someone else. Definitely a good book club choice.

How many people remember this from their English lit days? Tender is the Night is a study in the push-pull of relationships at their strongest and weakest. Dick Diver is a wealthy psychiatrist who falls for the mentally unstable Nicole Warren. A doctor marrying a patient begins as a dance between crazy and sane. Both are wealthy, society driven people with magnetic, charming personalities. The French Riviera serves as the backdrop and Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Murphy serve as the inspiration for the the first half of Tender is the Night. Zurich, Switzerland and Fitzgerald's relationship with his mentally ill wife, Zelda, help finish the rest of the story. Overall, it is a tragic display of how mental illness infects like a contagion, bringing down even the most solid of minds.

If you mix a diverse cast of not-particularly likeable characters, with plenty of money and free time on their hands in the 1920s, what you get here is the creation of the French Riviera and the dissolution of most of their relationships.In the way that it puts the meaningless lives of the leisure class under the microscope it is somewhat reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s moneyed rompings (think Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza etc.), but with a dash less wit and almost none of the philosophical musings. However there is psychological depth, and at times less of the caricaturing that Huxley could lapse into. The character development is good throughout this book, and uncovering their psychological complexities drives the plot forward to some degree. It could be a bit shorter and less drawn out in places without losing its impact, and it frequently drags. Nevertheless, it is still well written on the most part and would make a good holiday read.

Ok…. But it didn’t hang together as a story

The only reason I'm not giving this masterpiece five stars is because I am extremely bitter about the ending. Regardless, stop what you're doing and pick up this book.

Strange that Fitzgerald was most proud of this novel. While it is well written and impressive at times, the plot is weighted down by 1920s themes that are often tedious and/or silly. I’m happy to have read it and I enjoyed it, but I doubt i’ll Be rereading it as often as his other works.

Everyone should go through a Fitzgerald phase, preferably when they are young. I recommend starting with the short stories as a young teen and working your way through the rest as they fall into your hands.

I've been on a 1920s kick since I moved into a building that was built in 1929 last year, so I decided it was time to read all of Fitzgerald's work. I'd read this one before but I didn't remember it at all. It's hard to live up to Gatsby (which is one of my absolute favourite books of all time), but this book was also incredibly good, though it took awhile to get going (I wasn't all that captivated by the first third of it, but by the second third I couldn't put it down). It was rather difficult for me to read in spots because it stirred up some personal emotional stuff, but that was really just a sign of how powerfully written it was.

I read this in 2009 and never reviewed it. I remember liking it (better that Gatsby) but it isn't an uplifting story. Semi-autobiographical, it is the story of a doomed marriage. Set in the 20s, the couple are traveling in Europe and appear to be quite sophisticated and worldly. Zelda Fitzgerald was hospitalized in 1932 with schizophrenia. The author found himself in his darkest time when writing this book which he considered his greatest novel. The title is taken from the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats.

I'm just waiting for Miley Cyrus to play Rosemary. Purists will froth and rail. Book clubs across the first world will read and murmur, becoming appropriately misty-eyed when the Great War is broached. The Divers plight inspire much murmuring and nodding: they lost everything. Consequently and for really wrong reasons legions of people will discover this amazing novel. Is there an availible calculus to ascertain the propriety of these developments? Instead I'll the reference the sage Tegan and Sara and ponder the Business of Art.

Dulling, will you see the picture?

Alas, likely not. (sigh)

A bit of a disappointment on rereading after many years. Writing is uneven and he skips through parts that don't seem to interest him. I read that he had a hard time writing this, and it shows. And the ending--what? What is he saying? He just drops his character off in small-town America, bereft of his children, bereft of any sort of successful life. Doesn't actually make sense. Gatsby was sooo much better.