Tender Is The Night (But Thank God it's Over)

Just now, I have FINALLY finished Tender is the night. It's a week overdue at the library, but I sincerely doubt anyone is chomping at the bit to have it returned. If I hadn't committed to finishing it, I would have sent it back two weeks ago.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. (via)

Quite frankly, now that I've finished it, my impressions are no different.

The book begins by talking about a girl -- an American actress vacationing with her mother on the French Riviera. At first, it seems that the story is about her, or at least that she is a main character, but we quickly find out that she is merely a static character who weaves her way in and out of the story -- not inconsequentially, yet easily replaced by any other name or face. Through Rosemary, we are introduced to a privileged group of vacationers who share her beach, a group that includes the charismatic doctor Dick Diver and his beautiful wife Nicole.

It is Dick's story that the novel tells, and as the group moves into Paris and ultimately disperses, we learn more about this man and his past. An American, he came to Europe as a doctor for the army, and stayed on to write and to study topics of psychology. On a brief visit to a friend at a clinic in Switzerland, he was introduced to Nicole Warren, daughter of a wealthy businessman from Chicago, sent to the sanitarium to be cured of her psychosis. When he returns to Zurich to work at the clinic, he develops a relationship with the 16-year-old girl that goes beyond doctor and patient; he falls in love with her, and she with him. And then, believing that a closer relationship would allow him to help her more, he marries her.

The rest of the story chronicles the five years following the couple's encounter with Rosemary, and how that one spark of change -- in which Dick found himself falling in love with another woman, though, at the time, fighting to uphold his loyalty to his wife -- proved the catalyst for their eventual ruin. It is a story of love lost in clinical duty, of failures of business and heart, and of vitality and charisma that give way to bitterness and drunkenness.

Simply put, it's a terrible story. There is no happy ending, there is no heroic resolution. It just is.

That alone made the book difficult to get through. Infidelity, conflicts, and sadness permeate every page of the text. Even more, sometimes I found myself completely lost in the story, and having to return one or two pages to get my bearings and figure out what the devil was going on.

The interesting thing about the writing style is that, unlike The Great Gatsby, in which Fitzgerald chose a narrator (Nick), and followed him throughout the tale, this book moves effortlessly between narrators, though the entire tale is told in third person.

First, we see the world, and the Divers, through Rosemary's eyes. Though they are ultimately the heart of the story, we meet them as strangers, not with an immediate intimate knowledge of them, but as mysteries that only unfold through time spent together.

Then, as Rosemary leaves their side, the dialogue rests heavily on Dick - his actions, his past, his motivations, his views. We follow him all around Europe, sometimes with his family, and sometimes without, learning more about Nicole only through his disclosures and experiences.

And then finally, the book ends with Nicole at the helm, and we find ourselves regarding Dick as one regards a distant cousin, with little more than a polite interest in his whereabouts. Yet we can't help but feel sorry for him, knowing how he once was, and knowing that our hero has fallen from grace in a sad modern tragedy.

Even more interesting is Fitzgerald's relationship with his own novel. Every introduction to this work that I have read calls it vaguely autobiographical. For years, Fitzgerald fought beside and for his wife as she battled her own mental illness. Except in their case, I believe, he remained faithful, her fight ended in her death, and his success, found primarily before her decline, was only moderately impaired by his focus on her health. Perhaps, then, this story is a way that Fitzgerald might have wished his own tale to go. For all the bad things that lead to it, Tender is the Night ends with Nicole healthy and strong; if Fitzgerald loved and fought for his wife as hard as those introductions would suggest, it's quite possible he would have traded his own wellness, esteem, and success to that same end for Zelda, had it been possible.

I didn't even SparkNotes that. I'm getting better at this.

And the more I write, the more of an appreciation I'm gaining for the novel as a work of written art. That doesn't mean I like it. But I can appreciate it.

And that's good enough.