Tender is The Night

This is the first F Scott Fitzgerald novel I’ve read. I possibly have read the Great Gatsby, many many years ago.It is romantic sad tugs at the heart and very eloquently written. I enjoyed his style more than Hemingway’s, not to say that I do not enjoy Hemingway’s writings. My French is very rusty and I wish the editors would have provided some translations. FSF’s writing is a far cry from most of the current novelists that I read and in reality I thoroughly enjoyed his deft use of the English language truly a thinking person’s novel. I will next read his first novel asap

Tender is the Night was very interesting to me because I read it long after I read a biography of the writer. The book was written after Fitzgerald had been on a long dry spell and desperately needed money both to keep up his lifestyle and primarily to pay for incredibly expensive ongoing mental health hospitalization for his wife Zelda in Switzerland and the US. Fitzgerald takes a mix and match of his own life and those of others he met during the hey-day of American writers in Paris and Europe in the 1920's. Primarily, he uses a rich couple who coddled geniuses, Sarah and Gerald Murphy, as part models for the main couple of his book, Dick and Nicole Diver. While both of the Murphys were rich and started inviting the highly talented to their home by an initially almost private beach, Fitzgerald places the Divers in a close match to the Murphy's home on the French Riviera, has Dick raking the sand like Gerald Murphy did to make it habitable for sunbathing, and initially shows them as taste makers for the Lost Generation. However, Fitzgerald invents many parts of the Divers, such as one party to the relationship only being wealthy, while the other is a psychiatrist, and has the Divers travelling in a style much like the Fitzgeralds did, as they moved from one expensive hotel and rented apartment or home to another.

Due to Fitzgerald's own wife's quite serious mental illness, which to me made her as well as Nicole Diver, upon whom her madness is modelled, quite egocentric. Fitzgerald clearly shows the burden of being married to a seriously ill person before medication entered the picture in psychiatry. Everything revolves around the mentally ill person's feelings and weaknesses, with the sane spouse having to always be the strong one with no one to turn to for his own insecurities, such as we all have. The book shows how Dick struggles with this, and how it eventually destroys him. In essence, while the wife is expected to have the destroyed life, much like Zelda Fitzgerald had; in this case the wife comes out on top and essentially betrays the man who has protected her for so many years and brought her to full sanity.

Fitzgerald was extremely devoted to his wife, and devoted to her care (especially making sure it was paid for). as he drank himself into a more or less constant stupor as a process. I think this book was an outlet for him to tell what that felt like, as Zelda was talentless bur relentlessly jealous of her husband's talents. In fact, Zelda seemed to me to be much more dislikable than Nicole Diver in the book.

The book, which has been hashed over for decades as a major classic, is still well worth reading. Fitzgerald's writing is downright lyrical in its beauty and the narration keeps you turning the pages, even though the book is in no way a thriller or mystery. I did not feel gulty giving a few spoilers in this review because I am probably the only serious reader who really did not know the plot of the book before I read it. It deserves its status as a worldwide classic, and is one of the best written books I have ever read.

From the title through to the conclusion this book is a masterpiece, which I’ve read several times, each time drawing something different from it. It is a well of rich, lyrical writing, a romance, a tragedy. It is life, it’s lessons hard learned, that Fitzgerald gives to us from his own tortures. If you’ve ever loved, given yourself completely to a person and seen that pass away from you as you always knew in some part of you that it would, you should read this book. That it’s setting is the Riviera gives wing to Fitzgerald’s gift for description, the tone, the texture. You can feel the warmth of the water, the sand, the sky the winds that sweep across the pines and yet always this stands as a counterpoint to the human beings, their loves, their tragedies.

FSF completed Tender Is the Night as a more mature, more self-aware writer. There are bits that bear a family resemblance to his other works, but here he has been more deft with the brush, more sure of his touch, while at the same time more deeply realizing the heights at which a writer must work to grapple with truth. This is his finest completed work. The Kindle edition, alas, is far from perfect, having frequent problems with spacing and even the simple maintenance of typography. But it is readable, and the work required is supported by the reward of the read.

I really like Fitzgerald, so my review may be a little biased. This is a hauntingly beautiful story about how relationships can change people, for better or worse. Fitzgerald, as always, writes with breathtaking lyricism. If you've read Gatsby, and you liked the writing, you'll probably like Tender is the night. It's darker and more mature. When I read this book, I'd find myself re-reading passages just to wallow in the luxuriant beauty of Fitzgerald's prose.

On the other hand, the novel isn't as facile as some of Fitzgerald's other works. It drags in places, and the lyricism can sometimes distract from plot and character development. It's certainly less "perfect" than Gatsby. I think it's more human. You may get bored from time to time, but I think the book is worth the occasional slow patch. I certainly don't regret reading it.