Customer Reviews

Tender Is the Night

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It's an utter failure. Because it's a character study without the slightest trace of characterological depth. Dick & Nicole remain dead on the page all the way thru. And please don't give me any crap about how Dick & Nicole were "deliberately written as ciphers in order to reveal their emptiness" because I'm not buying it. I certainly don't think that it was Fitzgerald's intention to render them as ciphers. But that's about the extent of his accomplishment here.

North America escaped the wave of Nihilism that beleaguered Europe after the Great War. Although escaping the horrendous casualty lists of the European nations, Americans aped Continental disillusionment with their own, anaemic version, of it. Retaining greater resources, America's wealthy survivors returned to Europe, filled with cynicism and indifference. Few books have caught the attitudes of interwar Americans as vividly as this one. It is a Judas kiss in depicting America's social values of the time. Few could enjoy the life he describes, yet all aspired to it. Fitzgerald caught and portrayed the segment of that society most people seem to remember. It's a limited view, but tightly focussed.

Richard Diver, married to what was then termed a "neurotic" woman, encounters a young movie star. Films were still silent and actresses were chosen for their physical appeal. Rosemary, although still a teen-ager, fills the image perfectly. Immature, notorious and vivacious, she sets her sights on Diver. Encouraged by her mother, although the motivation for this remains unclear, Rosemary applies her wiles on a man twice her age.

As the two encounter, separate and meet again, they interact with members of the expatriate community in France. Fitzgerald portrays most of them through the couple's viewpoint. The depictions are compelling and evocative, but there isn't an appealling one in the lot. Diver's role in the new [then] Freudian psychology gives Fitzgerald a mechanism for exploring the human psyche. The dismemberment of Freud's analysis by modern studies doesn't detract from Fitzgerald's descriptive prowess. Even from this distance in time he's remains a writer to turn to and reflect on. He's deservedly acclaimed as one of the "greats" of the twenties.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Or: Of Love and Loss: the Sacrifice for Gain. *Tender is the Night,* F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic fourth novel, shimmers with palpable autobiographical pain; it is catharsis, plain as day, for the regrets and reduction of a personal life, and the era that encompassed it. Fragmentary yet fully contained, brilliantly lucid as it describes the derailment of sanity, via incest-trauma or the alcoholic haze - *Tender is the Night* flows like a tone poem, vividly capturing the illusions and sickened foundations of its flawed protagonists, and the escapist existence in which they dwell. Herein lay ghosts, drifting through splendor, oblivious until it is too late, and then insensate still, crippled by self-imposed restrictions: the patterns of denial, dissipation and dream-death.

The novel concerns the relationship between married couple Dick and Nicole Diver, the husband a promising young psychiatrist with obscure goals about published research, the wife a fragile flower soiled early in life, the 'damaged goods' he takes on to teach, heal, and subconsciously reap in turn. At first, presented through the innocent gaze of child-actress Rosemary, the Divers seem like the quintessence of their sophisticated era: clever, classy, both elegant and subtly sensual, people so comfortable with themselves as to avoid the games and struts of the current 'season.' Young, restful, in love with each other and life in general, the Divers exhibit the ideal of the American Dream, if expatriat-ed from American soil . . . but the cracks begin to show, one by one, until the cultivated artifice is shattered and the sickness beneath exposed: the author therein chronicles the dissolution of this relationship, from beginning to end, drawing significant parallel from both his own life and the turbulent age in which he lived.

*Tender is the Night*: A requiem for a dream. Certainly the fallout with his wife Zelda influenced the novel's course; but I believe there is more to it. F. Scott Fitzgerald, and by extension his work, was/is inescapably tied with the exuberant façade of the Jazz Era, an era defined (at least in the socialite sense) by its splendor and waste, its heedless optimism blind of cost. And though Scott basked in the cradle of this opulent "season," the author seething beneath the fly-by-night exterior could not help but be keenly aware of its follies and hypocrisies: his novels and short stories savagely depict the inward condemnation he felt. But unlike earlier efforts, this, Scott's last completed novel, was composed between 1925 and 1934, and the disintegration of the roaring 20's into the dust-bowl Depression of the 30's seems to me clearly represented in the progression from *Tender's* first to third books - the illusion has crashed and there is no regaining it, despite the determined dissipative efforts contrary. This is a personal impression, one I read between the lines; and even considering the fact that Fitz lived overseas and that the events of this novel occurred almost completely in France and Switzerland, the metaphor is quite stark - to my mind, at least.

A more literal analysis, in any regard, clearly shows the price of atrophy, lost ambition and alcoholism; despite the 'happy' resolution to Nicole and Dick's co-dependency, the pain of loss - on both a psychic and physical level - is harrowingly delineated. Having recently been in the position of Dick Diver - that is, faced with the temptation of sacrificing personal goals in order to 'save' another from the manic-spiral - I can sympathize with the capitulation of his dreams for more immediate concerns: genetic-inspired attraction as strong a demand as the survival-instinct drive. Yet Nicole's rise, surmounting both the Father and the Father Figure in her quest for identity, is just as poignant. The antagonist here is simply _weakness_, and how it can be shared to disastrous result.

To define the myriad qualities of *Tender is the Night* into simplistic buzz-word recommendation: this is a haunting, occasionally stunning work, with beautifully lyrical prose and well-defined conflict, interspersed with casual insights into the urges/constructs of human reality. All in all it's a fantastic read, and perhaps my personal favorite of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work; (...)

Highly recommended.

Tender Is the Night is uncomfortably autobiographical, written after Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, was institutionalized. Though it begins with the story of Rosemary, an actress on vacation, hopelessly attracted to Dick Diver, a married man and successful psychiatrist, the story changes, without transtition, to focus on Dick and his wife's unsettling past. Rosemary fades almost completely out of the story while Fitzgerald, vicariously through Dick Diver, explores his coming to (or failure to come to) grips with ageing, his marriage, postwar stress, and the fear that ultimately his promising career would fail. Fitzgerald literally fulfilled his prophecy and never published another novel.

As with most Modern American literature, Tender Is the Night is a depressing story. We witness the dissolution of marriage, man, and find the Lost Generation ultimately just that--lost.

It's been several years since I read The Great Gatsby, but if memory still serves, Tender Is the Night is more captivating and, in my opinion, the better of the two.

I struggled to finish this book. It is laden with trivial charactersand the plot drags on endlessly while Fitzgerald keeps blindly grasping for the magic he had before he destroyed his mind with alcohol.
The writing in this novel is sloppy at best, and, as he confessed to his sometime-friend Ernest Hemingway (see Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast"), he often altered his writing for the sake of financial gain. This novel, which took over ten years to create, looks like the pained work of a man who has run out of gas. His focus was diverted by his alcoholism, his lust for financial success over artistry, and his wife's instability, and it shows.
The book drags on endlessly, and it looks like Fitzgerald is just trying to fill up pages (which he may have been, because Scribner wasn't happy with the much shorter length of The Great Gatsby).
Sure, there are a bunch of pretty sentences, and even a few unbelievable paragraphs scattered throughout, but good sentences don't make a good story, and they certainly don't overcome the weakness of these characters.

i recomend this to anyone who enjoys fitzgerald, it is perhaps his best work ever

Tender is the Night is no Gatsby (though what is), but it is still an important novel. It is more personal than the other of Fitzgerald's work and covers happy days in France through the madness and alcoholism that follows. As great as this novel was, there were some weaknesses. It did seem to get weaker as it went along. Part One is the best, Part Two is weaker and weakens as it goes along. And Part Three is the weakest of all--even Fitzgerald himself admitted that. Still, it is well written and you can see why Fitzgerald is an American classic.

Tender is the Night was written over a decade, and it shows. Characters grow, stop, we fast forward, and they change and mature without transition. Tempting is the correlations between Fitzgerald's companionship with mentally unhinged Zelda and Dick Diver's nurturing husband/psychotherapist to Nicole, an heiress and ex-schizoid in occasional relapse who was traumatized by her father at a tender age.

Tender is Dick's caressing but scientific approach to loving Nicole. When Rosemary Hoyt, a young starlet-to-be, pursues Dick with all due diligence, Dick loses the cool stability of his marriage experiment for the exciting, verily unscientific, if affected, opportunity to feel something new. Having committed himself to Nicole's love and care despite his better reason, Dick lives with the consequences he signed on to live with. His wife, recovering from her deep, despairing mental illness, sucks the life out of Dick, gaining strength with each drop of vigor he loses, fully aware of his inevitable failure.

Tender is the Night, where Fitzgerald starts to show the influence of Hollywood (not incidental, the Rosemary character, ey?) on his narrative composition, feels like a cast of actors playing their roles with converse dramatic irony. Nicole's and Dick's anticipation of the paths they are on, curves, divergences and all, perhaps account for the absence of dramatic tension and suspense in Tender is the Night. It is, instead, a journal of selected scenes catching the moods and musings of a doomed marriage, often striking poignancy at a perfect pitch.

I thought I had reached the high point of Fitzgerald's work when I read The Great Gatsby. I was wrong. This book is not as organized nor as focused as Fitzgerald's more popular work, but, in my opinion, it is better. The characters are astoundingly complex, and are fascinating to read about and get to know. The setting--various places in Europe--is brilliantly depicted. But what makes this book great is the interaction between the characters. It is a story of the Divers, Dick and Nicole, a couple who all but trade roles in the course of the novel. The story opens with Rosemary, a young actress, as she meets the Divers and is completely enthralled by them. Through Rosemary we see that the Divers are, in fact, very nearly the ideal couple at the beginning of the book; but this apparent bliss is a mask of a deep, complex, and difficult history, and an awful foreshadowing of a tragedy to come. The story moves backward to Dick and Nicole's meeting, then forward again to the tragic climax.

Dick, a psychiatrist, met Nicole at his clinic, where she was a patient. He was a brilliant young doctor and successful author, she, a broken and troubled youth. Dick helped her put the pieces back together, and married her. They lived an almost blissful existence for a time, but then Nicole began to relapse. The bulk of the novel deals with Nicole's problems and her struggle to overcome them, as well as Dick's growing problems, which he, with all his training, is not so able to move past. Dick and Nicole's relationship develops into something ugly, a shattered remnant of its past glory. And what is worse, it isn't even really Nicole's fault.

Fitzgerald has a gift for beautiful prose and a talent for storytelling that is almost unparalleled in literature. This book should be considered a classic, and surely deserved to emerge from the shadow of its sister work, The Great Gatsby, and be regarded as the masterpiece that it is.

OK I will try to retain my temper while rectifying some of the inexcusable comments made by various reviewers. Someone has said that this book has no structure to it and that it is confusing and difficult to read. That is strange, since one of my first thoughts after reading the first few chapters was 'By God this is nicely structured, isn't it? This Fitzgerald fellow must be a genius to pull it off like he does.' Furthermore, the story is told chronologically and causes no confusion in that aspect. I would also like to note that my mothertongue is Dutch and that English is only my third language, still I had no problems with the writing of Fitzgerald and found it easy enough to read.

I also get sick and tired of people who'll tell you the book is bad because the book and/or the characters are morally incorrect. Look, life isn't morally correct and neither are people, so why would you want your art to be? Perhaps you like to be lied to? I always wonder where these people get the authority (and the nerves) to question other people's morality.

Then another reviewer wrote that there is no central point to the story. I mean what book did you read? There is only one point to the story and that's the marriage between Dick and Nicole, how it came to be and how it eventually faded out like the day into the night, ever so tender.

And I think this is what most people have trouble with: Fitzgerald's subtle, almost minimalistic writing. In the whole book (my copy was 392 pages) there is not one redundant word, it's like a poem. If you want a good book that's beautifully written and masterfully structured, you can't go wrong with this one. If you want action, plot, speed, heroics, morals, endings and whatever it is you crazy kids crave for nowadays: go to the movies!