[.ca] Penguin Essentials Tender Is The Night (ISBN 0140282556)

From Amazon.com:
In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writers established itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregated at Gertrude Stein's select soirees, drank too much, married none too wisely, and wrote volumes--about the war, about the Jazz Age, and often about each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang of literary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgerald began writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was not actually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the States and his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness and alcoholism. Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and their creations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look for parallels between Fitzgerald's private life and the lives of his characters, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole. Certainly the hospital in Switzerland where Zelda was committed in 1929 provided the inspiration for the clinic where Diver meets, treats, and then marries the wealthy Nicole Warren. And Fitzgerald drew both the European locale and many of the characters from places and people he knew from abroad. In the novel, Dick is eventually ruined--professionally, emotionally, and spiritually--by his union with Nicole. Fitzgerald's fate was not quite so novelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 to pay her hospital bills. He died three years later--not melodramatically, like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is the Night is arguably the one closest to his heart. As he himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith."

Drifting Through Splendor:
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.

Fitzgerald's Autobiography:
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.

Better than Gatsby but still unconvincing:
I was expecting to like this book more, and only checked it out because the library didn't have 'The Great Gatsby.' I liked this book more than Gatsby, but after having read both of them, I feel it's about as undeveloped and unconvincing as Fitzgerald's more famous work. I really liked Part One, but things really went south in Part Two. I really didn't see how Rosemary fit into the plot at all; she's this big-name rising starlet who is instantly warmly and closely befriended by all of Dick and Nicole's adult friends when they're in France, and she and Dick are mutually attracted to one another, an attraction strongly encouraged by Rosemary's mother. Unless there's something going on between the lines that I failed to see, this didn't seem like anything more than a young girl with a crush on an older married man, a crush that doesn't go much farther than some secret rendezvous where they don't do anything more than kiss, hold one another, and say sweet nothings. Then she drops out of their lives and doesn't appear again till close to the end, where she and Dick are talking like they shared some affair. How could the brief appearance of a young girl disrupt Dick and Nicole's marriage so much, esp. since they never even slept together? This is just like a lot of books with alleged affairs or love stories which are never given any motivation or credibility, explaining why these two people are attracted to one another and would want to leave an existing relationship for this new dangerous one. It really insults the reader's intelligence. Besides the alleged love story, the character development of Dick and Nicole were also really wanting. We know that Nicole has been psychologically unstable anyway since she was a young girl (indeed, she and Dick met while he was treating her in a mental hospital), but there's no insight into why she goes back to her old unglued ways. Her behaviour doesn't even seem that out of control, just erratic and a bit strange. We also get no insight into why Dick also starts on a course towards his own mental breakdown. I had no understanding of why they began acting that way; why should I consider him the hero and root for him when I'm given no insight into his condition, no explanation or rationale for his behaviour, and when he doesn't want to deal with his wife's serious problems, who indeed even worsens them? There were also a few pointless and dead-end subplots, like Abe North's problems in Paris and the incident towards the end involving Mary North and Lady Sibley-Beers. The edition I read also had a lot of untranslated French passages, as though everyone still speaks French as a second language or even speaks it more often than their native tongue. Those days are gone, and there's no need to belabour the point by having whole conversations in French when the reader knows that they're in France and speaking to French people. The end of the book was also a big dead-end. The story was interesting, just not convincing, realistic, or believable.

A great ape:
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 \othen\c 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. \ostephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada\c

A big fat flop:
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.