Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night (Classic Fiction) (New Longman Literature)

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Set in the South of France in the decade after the First World War, Tender is the Night explores the new world of moneyed leisure found by the first generation of idle-rich Americans to take refuge in the French Riviera, bracketed between the horrors of the Great War and the Great Depression to come. It 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.

F. Scott 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.

This stunning Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Tender is the Night features an afterword by Ned Halley.

Reviewed by celinenyx on

2 of 5 stars

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Unsurprisingly, The Great Gatsby was the first book by Fitzgerald that I read. Tightly planned, fantastic writing, interesting themes of obsession, wanting, and the obscenity of the wealthy: I loved it. I picked up Tender is the Night in the hopes of finding more of this.

Set in the 1920s, Tender is the story of a marriage. Dick and Nicole Driver are the sparkling midpoint of their social circle of rich Americans touring the European continent. Their acquaintance with young actress Rosemary puts pressure on the cracks in their marriage, bringing them to a breaking point.

Some of the elements that I admire in Fitzgerald's writing make an appearance in the book. He has a wonderful eye for description, playing with language until it describes not how things look but their essence. His characterisation is of similar quality, and ultimately Tender is the Night is one long exercise in describing people as they go through the motions of life. Sadly, one can have too much of a good thing. Unlike the tight writing of The Great Gatsby, this book meanders and drowns drawn-out sequences. It is the sort of novel that makes one go "what is the point of this all?"; a feeling that isn't helped by the off-hand sexism and racism that both the characters as well as the narrator engage in. I was expecting Fitzgerald's tendency to see women as objects of admiration - Daisy in Gatsby is the prime example of this - but I felt there was an edge of malignancy in Tender is the Night that I hadn't noticed before in Fitzgerald's writing.

Fitzgerald's creations sometimes vary in quality; Tender is the Night is a bit of a dud.

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Trigger warnings: alcoholism, mental hospital, mental illness (schizofrenoid disorder), emotional abuse from partner, racism (including treating racial murder offhandedly).

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  • 14 March, 2018: Reviewed