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Tender Is the Night

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Thought provoking and brilliantly written "Tender is the Night" etches itself into your brain: once read, never forgotten. Longer, looser but more complex and much darker in its subject matter than "The Great Gatsby", Scott Fitzgerald similarly transcends time & place to leave you with quite unforgettable images. For example, describing an open-air dinner party on the Cote d'Azur he writes: "There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights." And, thirty years after first reading that wonderfully evocative description, it's still there: burned-in as a reference-point that follows me around all open-air late night parties... just waiting for that distant bark.

Replete with similar passages, "Tender is the Night" juxtaposes romantic idylls with the personal tragedies surrounding most of its characters, and, in so doing, triumphs in exploring the differences between perception and reality, superficiality versus excess, strength of character versus fear & weakness, and uncontrollable madness versus self-induced self-destruction. Drawing you into a hedonistic world that you would sincerely wish to be part of and then exploding its deficiencies in front of you, it leaves you realising that not all is what it seems.

Closing with a superbly structured final paragraph that ranks as one of the most effective I've ever read - bringing together everything that the book seeks to explore in a few cogently dismissive and understated sentences - this is writing at its very best: compelling, perceptive, complex, timeless and, beneath its superficially "glossy" exterior, very true. If you haven't read it do: it's one of the best books out there.

I liked Tender is the Night even more than I expected to. As a fan of a few of his other works (notably The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise and The Collected Short Stories), I went into this book with a healthy enthusiasm. . . What I discovered was a story that was painful to watch unfold and one that kept me engaged and interested in what was happening from the first page to the end.

It tells the tale of Dick Diver, his wife Nicole, and numerous other equally complicated individuals who sway in and out of their lives over the years following World War One and just prior to the rise of Adolph Hitler. Americans living in or around Paris and the resort spots of France, these are rich people, people so rich that their money has literally destroyed them. They have become those rare people who don't have to wish for anything physical, whether it comes in the dream of a mansion on a hill in some far away country, a group of friends that includes royalty and movie stars, or sexual conquests with anyone you can even momentarily desire. All their dreams have, or could possibly on a whim, come true. And so there is nothing in this life left for them . . .

It is a sad tale of likable people coming unglued, of seeing their lives destroyed and watching nobody care, regardless of their goodness. It is a story of absolute and utter desolation, finally, as the almost journalistic ending comes at you. It is like falling out of touch with someone who was once the most important person in your life, hearing vague stories about what they are up to and realizing they are getting fainter and fainter and fainter . . .

This was quite obviously a very personal book for its author, a disillusioned man who saw many of his own dreams come true early on and who was left to watch his own joy turn into boredom and finally complete indifference. This book is the nightmare that all of us hope never comes true. It is somewhat comforting, in the end, to realize that in spite of his own early death, his crazy wife and his alcoholism, F. Scott Fitzgerald's story isn't anywhere near as terrible as this one.

It is, among a multitude, one of the better books I have ever read.

The Great Gatsby is without a single doubt one of the greatest American novels ever written and has well deserved its position as a permanent fixture in American literarture classes. Everyone and their sister had read The Great Gatsby. I personally loved it, but that was before I read Tender is the Night. It touched my heart and got under my skin an infinity more deeply than The Great Gatsby. It is a work that cries with hopelessness, loneliness, and broken dreams.

Tender is the Night chronicles the downfall and eventual ruin of Dick Diver, a smart, handsome pshychiatrist. He has everything in life going for him. He has friends, beautiful children, money, ability, and so much love for his wife Nicole. But this idealistic life can not long endure and Dick's sparkling world soon begins to unravel. Nicole turns out to be a schizophrenic. Though her mental illness has been dormant for years, it begins to resurface, destroying Dick's confidence, optimism, his marriage, and his very life.

Tender is the Night is almost painful in its emotion. Fitzgerald seems to have filled the very pages of the book full of his tears. As this book was written, his own wife Zelda institutionalized as a schizophrenic, making this novel semi-autobiographical. This work is so astounding simply because of the feeling it reveals straight from the heart of its author, making it one of the most intimate portraits I have ever read. Tender is the Night is an absolute masterpiece.

This is my favorite Fitzgerald novel, primarily for its biographical proximity to their similarly glamourous and ghastly marriage. The story opens on the unspoiled Riviera where money and adventure ruled, the Divers were the epitome of the expatriots of the Lost Generation/Jazz Age. Not only mythically gorgeous, Mrs. Diver was an ideal as a mother and dramatic gardener. She removes to an Eden-like retreat of lush and fragrant blooms that is infamous for its mistakes, i.e. Fitzgerald's lack of familiarity mixing tulips with sunflowers and other late summer blooms. The endless parties and thrill seeking begins to cloud the horizon and the startling secret that the couple have been trying to elude, breaks into a storm.
The unraveling of this pharntom perfection is indeed `Tender' and ineffably sad. Zelda and Scott scaled Olympus as well, and suffered from excess and what was explained as a streak of madness in Zelda's family like a fatal flaw.

The alcohol factor, in Zelda, given the advantage of the times, seems far more likely the major factor for her suffering than some arcane mental illness. Fitzgerald and Zelda were co-dependent, last stage alcoholics with irresponsible and self-centered natures, the ingredients of tragedy and self-destruction. The ingredients often of great writers.
Yet, in Tender Is the Night, it is more as if madness comes like fate to challenge such god-given beauty and glory. The hot Riviera, white walled, and perfumed heaven is no where else so perfectly envisioned. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is generally considered a better work, but for pure mood to attach to the Lost Generation, this is by far and away the one that touches my heart.

Not the most cohesive of Fitzgerald's work, Tender is the Night does deliver on Fitzgerald's beautiful prose and heartbreaking characterizations. The novel explores the disintegration of a promising young American doctor whose idealism comes under the crushing weight of hard capitalistic power. At times it becomes difficult to believe in the main character's steady decline since early in the novel he is depicted as so brilliant and thoughtful. However, Fitzgerald tries (and generally succeeds) in making the argument that American idealism is a fragile thing and not impervious to the destructive power of money.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets

Written with difficulty over a period of nine years, Tender Is The Night (1934), the last novel F. Scott Fitzgerald published during his lifetime, was something of a critical and commercial failure upon its release at the height of the Depression. Though it has had many prominent public admirers over the decades, the book is a dull, strained, and rambling failure concerned with transparent, narcissistic characters, who, in a later era, might have comfortably stepped out of any of Sidney Sheldon' novels.

Tender Is The Night is sadly shorn of the maniacal spontaneity of initial Fitzgerald novel This Side of Paradise (1920) and the depth that the first person narrative provided in The Great Gatsby (1925). Though the peripheral characters find protagonists Dr. Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole, to be dazzling, irresistible, and dynamic, on the page they are so blandly drawn that each is barely discernable from the rest of the equally nondescript cast. Diver, who is supposed to be a reputable psychiatrist, simply appears like a slightly more dapper cad among cads, and something of a fool.

The lives of these affluent men and women seem empty indeed; when not flattering one another or merrily drawing a firm line of exclusivity between themselves and the rest of humanity, the characters amuse themselves by making cutting and sardonic remarks about the hoi polloi. Shallow good manners, rather than substantive values, fuel their lives. The extroverted Dick and Nicole Diver are initially portrayed as compulsive socializers who are locked into their public personas, which fit them as snugly as straight jackets; left alone together, the silence is deafening and the minutes yawn. As if suffering an ethical failure, Fitzgerald appears to hold his unlikable characters and their lifestyles in high esteem, a factor that finally damns the book completely, since the collapse of Diver's sunlit house of cards is meant to represent a poignant tragedy.

Though some scholars believe that struggling Depression audiences simply weren't capable of focusing on a novel about the lives of the wealthy, the more probable reason is that the book is unenjoyable and feels concocted and self conscious at every turn. And with good reason: during the period in which the book was written, Fitzgerald continually rearranged the novel's plot, theme, and focus as his own life became increasingly troubled and unsettled. This uneven patchwork approach is evident in both large and small ways, such as when naive but poised Hollywood ingenue Rosemary leaves a party and is inexplicably "shaken with audibly painful sobs," though four short, uneventful paragraphs later on the same page, Fitzgerald writes, "it was time for Rosemary to cry," apparently forgetting that Rosemary is crying already. Throughout Book One, Fitzgerald moves haphazardly from vaguely-conceived scene to scene, overwriting but still failing to include the essential, and thus allowing what little credible plot there is to evaporate like a mirage. Contrived set pieces involving a duel, a railway shooting, and a murder in a hotel--none of which add anything pertinent the plot--suggest that Fitzgerald simply didn't know how to proceed or express what he wanted to say.

Throughout Book One, the omnipresent narrator's point of view, like the characters whose story he relates, is pretentious and smugly inauthentic; Abe North's mouth, for example, is characterized in terms of its "inability to endure boredom," while in another scene, the group, eyeing the casual behavior of strangers, discusses the reasons why Diver "is the only sober man" in the world capable of "repose," a quality they apparently hold in inestimable regard. When Diver is briefly accosted by a strange man while waiting on a Paris street corner, rather than state this plainly, Fitzgerald writes, "After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact." Though a discernable plot remains elusive and the characters are ghostly and insubstantial, Fitzgerald repeatedly focuses on the extraneous: when Diver scribbles out a check drawn from questionable funds, Fitzgerald writes, "As he wrote he engrossed himself in the material act, examining meticulously the pen, writing laboriously upon the high glass-topped desk."

The more prosaically written Book Two reveals that Fitzgerald had little genuine insight or hard knowledge about psychology, despite references to Freud, Jung, Bleuler, and Adler, though he continues to offer poorly expressed pseudo-philosophical insights such as "He knew, though, that the price of his intactness was incompleteness." Not only does Fitzgerald make the common mistake of identifying schizophrenia as "split personality," but the closest the author comes in attempting to describe mental illness is "a cousin happened upon her mad and gone." As if hoping to correct the structural errors of the first section, Book Two compresses so much explicit activity in its pages that events degenerate into a series of convenient and unbelievable coincidences. There are passages of unintentional hilarity, such as "He was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York. He just managed to crawl home to the Racquet Club to die," suggesting that even on the very lip of perdition, Fitzgerald's diehard characters are snobs to the end.

With Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald played an ostensibly clever, dangerous, and deceptive game. The omnipresent narrator's point of view in Book One is clearly colored by Rosemary's naive and idealized perception of the Divers, thus making the objective truth about the couple impossible to ascertain. Book Two, which adopts an entirely more factual tone, then peels away the false glamour and purports to reveal the rot beneath the shimmering surface. But Rosemary's presence doesn't explain Book One's narrative pretensions or the manner in which Fitzgerald has misled the reader in an attempt to produce what he calculates will later become a tragically ironic effect. But since the lives the Divers appear to lead in Book One is spurious at best, Fitzgerald's gambit falls flat.

No matter what the pundits say give this book a chance, and you'll find it to be Fitzgerald's best. The Great Gatsby may be more elegantly written but Tender Is The Night packs a wallop that makes the former seem a bit too cute and melodramatic. With the revelation of Nicole Warrens's source of mental illness (which you'll find in the unabridged version), the plot moves along at a snappy pace with premonitions of a future tragedy hinted at but never revealed (which is the sign of master storyteller). The ending is incredibly sad and because of it incredibly beautiful. Unlike Nick Carraway's eulogy that acts like a balm, the 3rd person narrative of Tender Is The Night offers the reader no such solace. There's only the lingering image of a man born to be great, broken beyond repair.

At first I thought this was about a marriage, then adultery, then co-dependency, then madness, then and then and then..... This is a book about unraveling in all its forms. Everything of importance -- love, places, people, and finally dreams unravels until there is nothing left and everything has been stripped bare and drained. This is not just a portrait of a man, his wife, a marriage, a family, a lifestyle, a time -- it is all of these in turn.

I actually prefer this book to Fitzgerald's masterpiece dissection of the American Dream, The Great Gatsby. Tender Is the Night is not always easy to read, and it does cover some of the same thematic ground (alienation, for one), but it is much more of an intimate, psychological portrait. It is detailed where Gatsby is spare, as it shreds layer upon layer of resilience and dignity. A devastating and achingly beautiful book.

Tender Is the Night is one of the most interesting examples in 20th century fiction of reversing the usual social metaphors. Dr. Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, is examined as a case of mental health. He is also placed in a classic woman's role, that of the desired, amiable beauty sought after by all and sundry. These juxtapositions of the usual social perspectives allow the reader to touch closer to the realities of human need and connection, by piercing our assumptions about what is "right and proper."

The story begins from the perspective of Rosemary Hoyt, an 18-year-old motion picture star, recuperating on the Rivera. One day she goes to the beach and becomes entranced by the Divers, Dick and Nicole, a golden couple with whom she immediately falls in love. Beautiful, young, rich, and looking for adventure, she quickly sets out to capture Dick who is the most wonderful person she has ever met.

Later, the story shifts to Dick's perspective and traces back to the beginnings of his marriage to Nicole. She had formed an accidental attachment to him (a classic psychiatric transference) while residing in a mental hospital. He returned her friendship, and found it impossible to break her heart. They married, and he played the role of at-home psychiatrist tending her schizophrenia. All went well for years, but gradually he became weary of his role. His weariness causes him to re-evaluate his views on life . . . and the psychological profile of Dr. Diver, charming bon vivant, begins.

The tale is a remarkably modern one, even if it was set in the 1920s. Fitzgerald deeply investigates the meanings of love, humanity, and connection. In so doing, he uncovers some of the strongest and most vile of human passions, and makes fundamental commentaries about the futility of fighting against human nature. The result is a particularly bleak view of life, in which the tenders may end up more injured by life than those they tend. What good is it to please everyone else, if they offend rather than please you instead?

The character portrayals of Rosemary Hoyt, Dick Diver, and Nicole Diver are remarkably finely drawn. I can remember no other book where three such interesting characters are so well developed. You will feel like each of them is an old friend by the time the novel ends.

If you have ever had the chance to read Freud, the novel will remind you of his writings. There is the same fine literary hand, the succinctness and clarity of expression, and the remorseless directness of looking straight at the unpleasant. I felt like I was reading Freud rather than Fitzgerald in many sections.

This book should open up your mind to thinking about which social conventions you observe that leave you uncomfortable . . . or which are in contradiction to your own nature. Having surfaced those misfitting parts of your life, I suggest that you consider how you could shift your observation of conventions to make them more meaningful and emotionally rewarding for you.

Be considerate because it pleases you to be, not as a ruse to obtain love!

When I critique a literary work, I often consider the same elements that any other critic may: plot, theme, diction, style, etc. However, it is a rare occurrence when someone reads a story to which he/she can absolutely relate. After all, literature is best at providing a person with a way in which to be entertained, yet learn something about him/herself. In my case, I read Tender Is The Night during a period when I was breaking up with my girlfriend. If it were not for this situation, I would not have appreciated this work, but due to my circumstances, I became especially interested. I found that I could relate to many of Dick Diver's emotions, while at the same time I realized the genius with which Fitzgerald writes this novel. I knew that a person could learn a lot about him/herself through reading since literature can act as a mirror which people can see themselves, but I never knew that reading could create such an intimate experience that would hit me so close to home. Nevertheless, this book is one of the greatest literary works that I have ever read, and I would suggest that this would be a great novel for anyone who enjoys tragic human behavior.