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    Tender is the Night
    Tender is the Night
    Tender is the Night
    Ebook506 pages9 hours

    Tender is the Night

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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    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 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."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMay 27, 2003
    ISBN9780743247412
    Tender is the Night
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His short stories and novels are set in the American ‘Jazz Age’ of the Roaring Twenties and include This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, and Tales of the Jazz Age.

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    Reviews for Tender is the Night

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Read from a tropical rooftop in the heat of a Mexican summer. The book takes you places no matter your station in life.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      It’s a hard reading! At a certain point, I checked on the Internet if other readers had thaught the same - to my relief, that’s the case. The book is famous for being a laborious reading. Nevertheless, F S Fitzgerald has such a keen eye, and such a modern way of describing what he sees... I mist reread this book! There are treasures to discover inside.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      In 1932, F Scott Fitgerald was living in suburban Baltimore. His father had recently died and his wife Zelda had been committed to a psychiatric institution in Switzerland. He finally decided that the novel on which he had been working on and off since the publication of “The Great Gatsby” in 1925 would be about the destruction of a man of great promise through an ill-judged marriage. In writing the novel, Fitzgerald liberally used material from his life. This material included his relationship with Zelda, their life together in France, the life-style of wealthy American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, the death of his father, his alcoholism, what he had learned about psychiatry since Zelda had her first mental breakdown, and his despair at what he considered to be the waste of his potential as a writer. The novel which emerged from this extraordinarily difficult period in Fitzgerald's life is not easy to read. At first I thought I didn't want to keep reading, so little did I care about the characters and their concerns. However, when the narrative moved into flashback, detailing the circumstances leading up to the marriage of the central characters, Dick and Nicole Driver, I became interested in the narrative and that interest was sustained until the end.Knowing that this is the most autobiographical of Fitzgerald's works and understanding a little about the circumstances under which he wrote it adds poignancy to the reading experience. Fitzgerald clearly felt very sorry for himself, but from that self-pity was born a powerful and haunting novel.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      In the late 1920s, Rosemary Hoyt, a young Hollywood starlet, encounters the glamorous Dick and Nicole Diver on a beach in the French Riviera and falls in love with the pair, particularly Dick. However, all is not as it seems in the Divers' marriage with Dick playing the role of both husband and doctor to Nicole whose mental illness is a constantly recurring third party in their disintegrating relationship.First and foremost a character study, Tender Is the Night slowly reveals the inner-workings of Dick Diver over the course of several years, investigating how an intelligent and ambitious man ended up in a relationship in which he feels he is slowly losing his independence. However, surrounding the melancholy tale of Dick, Fitzgerald beautifully describes several parts of Europe and the life of the idle rich American expats who lived there during the late 1920s. A read that is great not only to experience the skills of an author near the height of his brilliance but to empathetically observe Dick on his decline
    • 4/5
      F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is strategically broken up into 3 sections. Each section lends itself to a different perspective of the story, and each one made me re-evaluate my character adoration levels. I didn't rank it as high as Gatsby, because, well...it's not Gatsby, but I did enjoy it overall.

      Summary:
      We start out with Book One, and are introduced to Rosemary, the American acress, who meets up with Dick Diver and his wife Nicole. At this point in the story, I am in love. In my mind, Dick Diver and Jay Gatsby are one in the same - surrounded by parties, surrounded by meaningless people with lots of giggling, and lots of drinking going on. It appears to be a happy time, and you are instantly drawn into the lightheartedness that obviously exists on the French Riviera. Rosemary is, of course, enamored with Dick, and even comes to love Nicole. Good times.

      Book Two, however, takes on a different side altogether, where we learn the backstory of the Divers. Turns out that Dick is actually a psychoanalyst and that his patient is Nicole. This part makes no sense to me. Guys aren't typically into this much drama, and it's almost as if he's talking himself into this pairing. I know he says that he loves her, but I never did get the really strong feeling that he did. This section really started me thinking that perhaps Dick wasn't all that strong of a person to start with.

      Book Three takes us through Dick's fall - he starts drinking more, becoming more and more disrespectful to his friends, and has much more of a disregard for anyone and anything around him. Nicole, on the other hand, is becoming stronger. It's almost as if they have one supply of energy and if one is strong, the other is weak. It just feels like the energy has now shifted and Nicole is coming out on top. At the end, it's all about Nicole, and Dick just sort of fades away.

      This is only the second Fitzgerald book I have read, and yet, it's obviously by him. His style is very bouncy. While the sentences themselves are easy to read, you fly along (as if at a party) enjoying the cadence of it all, to realize that he has shifted gears and you have no idea what has just happened. I found myself rereading on several occasions as a result so that I could try to grasp the storyline.

      There is also a personal connection to this story - apparently, Fitzgerald's wife was schitzophrenic, and he is also claimed to have had an affair with a Hollywood actress. Thus, while this is a work of fiction, I'm sure for the author, it was much more than that, and may have accounted for the darker elements of the story often overtaking the lighter parts.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It took a long time for me to actually get through Tender is the Night...it ended up not being such a dreadful read as I thought it would be from the first section, which is mainly frivolity with rather derogatory remarks about the females in the book wanting to have a man to tell them how to feel, think, and even one in which a woman following a man (her husband) around and losing her own identity is referred to as a trophy.


      I've been told by someone dear to me that this is just time period, etc. However, my main feeling is just that good authors rise above that and there were plenty of strong female authors that had been around by that time that for sure demonstrated the ability to think on their own...let's see...Virgina Woolf, Mary Shelley, and of course the Brontë sisters. I digress but you get the idea how incensed I was, right? I wanted to tear apart the book from cover to cover. To make it worse, the main character also makes quite a few racial remarks that are again perhaps passed off as "sign of the times" but still got under my skin quite a bit.


      That said, the other thing that really stinks about the first part is how nauseatingly formulaic it is. The plot is incredibly predictable...naive young actress from Hollywood travels to France, wants to learn the ways of love through an older man (male protagonist) who happens to also be married. It literally sickened me to read in pretty much every way imaginable. For the most part, the beginning section is drivel.


      Where the book grows interesting is towards the middle and end as it speaks more about aging and losing all of your charms and friends...of the mental insanity of one of the female characters and, in some ways, even a process of giving up and losing control. Then, losing life's meaning and drifting away into a nothingness. It's the opposite of frivolity and if were rated alone, would be given a 4/5 (the first section more like a 2/5 stars) No, this later part may be incredibly depressing but it seems to have relevance that carries weight in a timeless sense that almost makes the initial suffering worthwhile.


      Oh and as a side note, though this is only a minor spoiler...it was a very strange read for me coming from upstate NY...the male protagonist is from Buffalo, NY originally and refers to this a few times...at the end, he actually ends up in the town where I was born: Hornell, NY which has a population of about 15 people, including the fictional character.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Beautiful writing and evocative of a time and place. The narrative was disjointed and went on for too long. i never built much empathy for the characters. Fitzgerald excels in shorter fiction but becomes unfocused in longer works such as this one.
    • 3/5
      Really mixed feelings about this one! Was a re-read from approx 20 years ago, and my memory (hazy) is that I thought WOW at the time. This time, I just didn't actually get it really. Was quite pleased just to get to the end. Shame, as I suppose my expectations were high, and they were dashed. Hate not finishing a book so forced myself through it.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyable to me because partly set in the place where I live, and other places with which I am familiar such as Cannes, Nice, Monaco... in the 1920s and how different from now! The story of Dick and Nicole Diver, their meeting and marriage, the irruption of a beautiful young movie actress, Rosemary Hoyt, 1920s expat American high society. "No one goes to the Riviera in summer". Some things made me smile and wonder, such as the cheese fondue in Gstaad, "an indigestible kind of Welsh rarebit" served with mulled red wine, is that possible? (I am quoting from memory so maybe not the exact words). And I did not understand why characters in Zug/Zürich are addressed in French (German is spoken there). Some passages are beautifully written; this is much better than The Last Tycoon or This Side of Paradise.While I think, I would like to say that although this is an elegantly bound collection with its gorgeous Bickford-Smith covers,and the paper satisfyingly thick, the actual printing is shoddy, so uneven, with thick blotchy passages interspersed with faint ones, broken lettering: I can't understand how these were printed. There is a tedious list of variant spellings at the end (Scott Fitzgerald's corrections) largely concerning hyphenation, capitalization and French accents. Rather than this I would have preferred a proper editing job, correcting typos such as filigree rather than filagree, etc.
    • 4/5
      From the book description: "Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise."Tender is the Night is about loving as an act of faith, the kind of long term loving that involves taking in all the flaws of your lover and absorbing them until two people merge into a gentle and vulnerable intimacy. Apparently, the story is grew from Fitzgerald's own experiences with loving Zelda, which can definitely be seen in the tender, bruised way the story is approached. I never appreciated Fitzgerald's writing while reading Gatsby in school, but his style is crisp and clean, the kind of writing that bring physical and emotional vividness without belaboring the point (so, I'm definitely going to have to try Gatsby again). Though sorrowful, there's a sweetness to this book as well, the way one nostalgically looks back on a rough and hurtful memory with a smile.
    • 2/5
      Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night shows a steep decline in quality from his earlier books. Gone is the perfection of expression so readily on display in The Great Gatsby; gone also is the sense of true tragedy (and this is another tragedy from Fitzgerald, make no mistake), the vivid characterization, and the intuitive sense of plot and pace. Where Fitzgerald was a growing artist in his first two books, showing characters that were both snobby and satisfying, here he seems to have lost the thread of those works and instead opted for characters painted exclusively in beige. I don't know whether it was the tremendous amount of time he took between Gatsby and this book, the purported alcoholic binges, or the mental decline of his wife, but never before has an artist showed such a stark dimming of talent than here. The first section is some of the worst writing in Fitzgerald's entire career as a novelist.
    • 3/5
      The scene is the French Riviera and the Swiss Alps in the 1920s and 30s. Amidst the frivolous world of European resorts and clinics, the marriage of a glamorous Upper-class American couple slowly disintegrates. They suffer from Bad Nerves, alcoholism, and dysfunctional families, and eventually realize that Money Can't Buy Happiness.Some brilliantly poetic passages interspersed with bland pedestrian psychology.
    • 3/5
      I really didn't have a particularly strong reaction to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" -- I really didn't love it or hate it... reading it didn't really impact me in any way. (I had expected to love it, having read and enjoyed "The Great Gatsby" many times.)The novel is the story of the Divers, a wealthy American couple, who spend time with a glittering crowd on the French Riviera, including a 19-year old actress named Rosemary Hoyt. It has all the hallmarks of the 1920's era lifestyle of fabulous parties and interesting characters wandering around alcohol soaked rooms. I especially liked "Book 1" of the story, but as the novel moved on it felt a bit rambling and disjointed. Not all of the pieces seemed to meld together. Perhaps this is because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this over nine years and included bits and pieces of other half-started novels before settling on this particular story. Overall, I just found this book to be "okay."
    • 3/5
      Heavy going but beautifully written in parts. Slightly rambling and disjointed.
    • 5/5
      Ese es mi deseo por favor y comprensión y disculpas solo quisiera confirmar mi asistencia.
    • 2/5
      The Great Gatsby was my first foray into the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald.I read Tender is the Night imediately upon finishing the Great Gatsby. I can't say how disappointed I am in both.I can see that possibly this was a completely new type of story in the 1930's but, regardless, I am mystified at why Fitzgerald is considered such a great author. I find the writing stilted and strange. I find the stories almost pointless and the characters without any merit at all!
    • 2/5
      an unusual winding tale that begins with great fourish and detail and has a non-ending tinged with hollow sadness, interesting in a historical sense ... wealthy americans in Europe in the 20's ... but left me feeling let down
    • 4/5
      I’ll be frank - I didn’t think I would care for this book. Fitzgerald spent nine years writing it and by the time it was published in 1934, America was in the throes of the Great Depression; to read of the wealthy in the south of France at this time seemed in some way a little wrong to me. Hemingway’s praise of Fitzgerald’s talent while at the same time describing the chaos of his life and marriage to Zelda (see “A Moveable Feast”) did not further enamor me to the man, however, with all of that said, I decided to give “Tender is the Night” a shot.I was pleasantly surprised. The book could have used a little editing and tightening up in the beginning as well as the end, but if you wrestle with it early, I recommend patience. There are a lot of powerful themes here. The plot is not told linearly and it unfolds over the book (stop reading here if you don’t want to know more), but simply put, Dick Diver is a psychologist who has fallen in love with Nicole, the “scarcely saved waif of disaster”, a wealthy patient who is erratic and not completely mentally stable. Obviously Fitzgerald relies heavily on his own tortured marriage here. Dick marries Nicole and the two lead the life of rich socialites, but beneath the surface, in addition to the wear of being both a husband and a doctor to her, the thrill is gone. Enter Rosemary, an eighteen year old Hollywood actress, who quickly falls in love with Dick, despite the age gap and his marital status. Along the way it is revealed that Nicole’s mental instability stems from sexual abuse she suffered as a child by her own father; Fitzgerald does not dwell on this, alluding to it on a single page, but it is all the more powerful and heartbreaking as a result. Despite not being able to leave his wife and commit to the younger girl, Dick is tortured by jealousy over her, as she is just coming into her own and blooming in life. Fitzgerald makes great use of recurring, haunting inner dialogue that Dick imagines Rosemary to have had with other lovers when reminded of her at odd moments (“Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?”). Occasionally the dialogue and phrasing of eighty years ago brings a little smile (“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent – things get difficult.”), but the feelings and emotions usually ring true, and the interplay between Dick and the women in his life is always interesting (“Come and sit on my lap close to me”, he said softly, “and let me see about your lovely mouth.”).While Nicole and Rosemary both get stronger over the course of time, Dick degenerates into alcoholism and regret over both loves. From seeming to have it all to not living up to his full potential, and fading out into obscurity … clearly one of Fitzgerald’s own fears, and perhaps the fear of many. Thumbs up.Quotes:On death:“…thinking first that old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections is gone?”On love:“She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at least she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.”“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.”“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.”I love this one:“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.’”As well as this one, on love reunited as well as May-December romances:“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.”On pain:“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.”On parenting, and the dangers of over-protectiveness:“The father, normal and conscientious himself, had tried to protect a nervous brood from life’s troubles and had succeeded merely in preventing them from developing powers of adjustment to life’s inevitable surprises.”On simplicity:“’You know, you’re a little complicated after all.’‘Oh no,’ she assured him hastily. ‘No, I’m not really – I’m just a – I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.’”On war, this after WWI and how ironic that WWII was a handful of years away:“’See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward from behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.’”On women:“Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as ‘cruelty.’ So long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Speers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch.”On writing for the masses:“Soon you will be writing little books called ‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman,’ so simplified that they are positively guaranteed not to cause thinking.”Lastly a bit of humor; the character of Abe North is funny:“Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: ‘Of course I’ve got one,’ he insisted, ‘- a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.’”
    • 5/5
      When we first meet Dick and Nicole Diver, a glamorous married couple living a life of leisure in the south of France, we know nothing about who they truly are. We see them only through the eyes of Rosemary, a young actress who becomes completely infatuated with them. As she falls for Dick, we see the story begin to spiral towards disaster, but we aren’t quite sure what’s going to happen. The second section of the book takes us back to the beginning of the story. We learn how Dick, a psychoanalyst, met Nicole because she was his patient. I think this is essential for the success of the story, because it’s important for the reader to understand that Dick knew what he was getting into when he married her. I didn’t become completely attached to the book until that second section. I need the back story in order to feel anything but distant interest in the characters. Once I was hooked I couldn’t looked away from the doomed love story. I’ve read The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and most of Fitzgerald’s short stories, but this one has a level of rawness and beauty that really struck a chord with me. Some of the lines are just so lovely. For example, read the following and just try to tell me that isn’t the most eloquent way to say that someone liked to look in the mirror… “He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself.” This novel was so fascinating because it’s so autobiographical. Fitzgerald talks about Dick drinks too much and Nicole “ruins” his genius and ambition. These are elements seem to come directly from his own life. That’s exactly how Hemingway described what Zelda did you F. Scott. It’s strange to think about writing a book that’s clearly a thinly veiled reference to your own dysfunctional life. Apparently there are two versions of this book. The original was published in 1934, while Fitzgerald was alive. The revised version was created by a friend of Fitzgerald’s, Malcolm Cowley, using the author’s notes. It was published in 1951. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s strange to think of multiple versions of the same book being out there. A few elements seem to spring from nowhere, but maybe I just missed something. There were a few references to Lanier and Topsy and at first I didn’t realize that they were their children. Also, their alcoholic friend Abe North’s story seemed to peter off until he only merited a mention later. Regardless, it is full of more brilliance than anything else. The writing completely captured me and in the end, that makes the book well worth reading. I think this may be my favorite Fitzgerald novel because it helps explain the tragedy of his own life. “There were other letters among whose helpless caesuras lurked darker rhythms.” “I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.” – Nicole “A schizophene is well named as a split personality ¬– Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going.”
    • 2/5
      I couldn't muster the tiniest about of sympathy for these characters; rich, self-involved characters who lazily make terrible decisions that will ruin their lives don't entice or interest me. I'd be more specific, but would hate to ruin the story in case someone else actually enjoys it. But I am certainly not one of those people.
    • 4/5
      Perfect summer re-reading, since I couldn't get to the Riviera myself. I still love this book.
    • 3/5
      Very well written, although I thought the plot meanders alot and ends a bit flat.
    • 3/5
      A screwed up story about a bunch of people with almost unlimited resources who somehow seem deprived of the sense they were born with. I was so happy when it ended.
    • 5/5
      I started reading this on Mar 10, 1952, and described it that day as eminently readable. On Mar 11 I called it a tour de force, and said it was by far the best I'd read of Fitzgerald's work. Of course I draw morals from the story: the unhappiness of wealth, the dangers of weak-willedness in regard to liquor. I thought the author a little weak when dealing with the actual exhibition of mental illness and its manifestation, but he is superb when dealing with the bored, the distressed, and the frenzied. He is wonderful at depicting social embarrassment, and the after effects. He is on such sure ground I tthink mainly because he lived the kind of life he did. He stands out in in his novels--he is much more obvious--because he lived at a full, riotous, and crazy pace and so endured so much. This is the best novel I've read so far this year.. I finsihd the book on March 12 and said the ending was weak but suitable.
    • 5/5
      Tender is the Night surpasses the more popular Great Gatsby. The book again is autobiographical in nature, with Nicole, the wife of the main character Dick, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's real-life wife Zelda. The external appearance of happiness created by the rich life lived on the French Riviera covers Nicole's psychological difficulties and Dick's attempts to live only on the surface due to his inability to continue coping with Nicole's problems. In spite of her psychiatric malfunctions, I found Nicole relatable and appealing and Dick's efforts equally interesting and likeable. This book has become one of my all-time favorites and I highly recommend it!
    • 4/5
      Dick Diver, whom Fitzgerald introduces through the implied point of view of Rosemary, a young Hollywood starlet, resembles the author's more renowned and equally enigmatic creation, Gatsby. Except Dick actually does something we can get a handle on: he's a doctor who knows a few things about psychology, one with a few blind spots about his own makeup. When we begin to see Dick's vulnerabilities, and the Gatsby-like underpinning of his backstory, Tender Is the Night takes flight.The same can be said Dick's wife, Nicole, a character drawn from on Fitzgerald's problematic real-life partner, Zelda. A formidable woman, as seen by Rosemary, the young ingenue, Nicole too is psychically fleshed out as the perfect couple begin to flounder. A head case of a different sort than Dick, she is in her own way as enigmatic.The two of them lead the high life on the French Riviera, in Paris and in Switzerland. Money, and the society that takes it for granted, supplies the setting, the travel, the hotel rooms at the Ritz and skiing vacations in Gstaad. But psychology, of course, is another matter. Money won't buy happiness in that realm, which we discover is not quite Dick's sinecure, that in fact he sees himself a kept man as the effect he has on those around him wanes--though his acuity remains intact--and as Nicole begins to assert herself.Tender Is the Night has much in common with its predecessor, This Side of Paradise, as well as Gatsby. In the latter, however, Fitzgerald put it all together, moving beyond the subjective inconsistencies of the privileged class and its assumptions about which he was both acutely aware but as a writer occasionally shorthand. Nevertheless, his struggle to define his protagonists is there in all the books, and makes this one a worthwhile read.
    • 5/5
      One of the best works of American literature ever, "Tender is the Night" is often overlooked due to the popularity of Fitzgerald more well known work, "The Great Gatsby." In my opinion, great works of American literature are ones that simultaneously capture the time in which they are set, and perfectly arc these struggles and triumphs to wider, common themes. Somewhat reflective of his own life, Tender tells the story of a psychiatrist who pulls a reverse Florence Nightingale and falls for one his is patients before she's truly better. The resultant relationship is less than perfect, but he struggles with duty to his vows, and the longings of his heart when a new interest- scandalous in her own way- makes her way on his scene. As always, reading Fitzgerald is like watching an author make slow, passionate love to the dictionary. He' brilliant with words, but not hifalutin like many of his contemporaries. What he tells is a captivating bittersweet tale of confusions and conflict, set against a beautiful backdrop of pain, joy and strife.
    • 2/5
      This is one of those rare books that I would have given up on if I was a quitter. I found the writing style hard going, confusing and just generally awful. If this is the norm for Fitzgerald I think I will stop here.
    • 3/5
      It's taken me a long time to get around to this review. Truth is, I still can't find interesting to say about it. After reading The Great Gatsby, I became an instant fan of Fitzergarld’s, which is why I picked up this book. But the style I found so enchanting in TGG quickly became cloying this time around, and furthermore I didn’t connect with any of the characters or their experiences in this story, even though they are faced with issues, such as mental health problems, which normally touch me in some ways. This book had it's moments, but it's safe to say that had I started with Tender is the Night first, it would have given me a much less favourable impression of Fitzgerald's great talent. More tedious than enjoyable, but still glad I added it to my repertoire. Three stars because no matter what, you can't deny his genius as a writer.
    • 3/5
      I have to admit that I did not finish this book. I read 161 pages of 313 pages. I found the characters superficial and devoid of morality. That said, you would think that would draw a reader in but I found the book rather boring.

    Book preview

    Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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