Scan barcode
A review by chrissych
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5.0
I've been sitting on this review for a while now, trying to determine what I could actually say about it that would get at my varied feelings about it without seeming morose, pessimistic, or otherwise lugubrious. But the fact is: Tender is the Night is, at its core, an incredibly depressing novel, and reaches unfathomable depths of beauty in its sad, quiet honesty. I think I've come to terms with the fact that I'm delighting in tragedy borne of the very real disappointments in the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, from which some facets of the novel are plainly derived. This is a painfully gorgeous and melancholy tale of slow demise and the natural erosion of love, wrapped in the splendid trappings of Fitzgerald's careful prose.
The story opens, rather unconventionally, at the peak of the protagonists' lives: a care-free summer on the French Riveria circa 1925, where a young American actress, Rosemary Hoyt, meets an expatriate couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, and falls in love. The point of view shifts slowly from Rosemary's childlike wonder to the building cynicism of Dick, who becomes the central protagonist and whose mystery-- a fabrication of Rosemary's youthful delusion-- is disassembled piece by piece. Dick and Nicole's history is chronicled in a piecemeal and fairly nonlinear unfolding of darkness and earnest efforts to overcome it, from the apex of their love to its eventual dissolution amid a lifetime of jealousies, quiet betrayals, and mental ghosts. The characterization of Nicole is modelled heavily on Zelda Fitzgerald, so a biographically savvy reader will have some idea of what to expect. The plot is a slow downward march, with its own peaks and valleys of course, from naive love and youthful confidence to a more crudely honest perspective and a jaded pessimism. It's depressing as heck to read, but Fitzgerald paints even the darkest moments in the most haunting of expressions, capturing the strange sad loveliness of failure and time and sickness.
Having been the other half to a mind afflicted by (much less serious but nevertheless impacting) mental illness, parts of the book were devastatingly real, to the extent that I'd have to take emotional breaks from reading it. Although I was captivated by the slow-motion train wreck before me, at times it read far too much like a mirror for comfort. But I think this is one of the qualities I enjoyed so immensely about the novel: it's inherently uncomfortable, fragments of broken private (real) lives laid bare in living poetry, daring the reader to look away. We know we should avert our gazes, but we can't. Fitzgerald captures that self-aware sense of unease in every chilling metaphor, every calculated collection of syllables, every snippet of dialogue giving us an untainted view of such lives, knowing that we won't look away until the last stitch of those lives has been undone.
It was stunning literature, very carefully crafted, and I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to feel.
The story opens, rather unconventionally, at the peak of the protagonists' lives: a care-free summer on the French Riveria circa 1925, where a young American actress, Rosemary Hoyt, meets an expatriate couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, and falls in love. The point of view shifts slowly from Rosemary's childlike wonder to the building cynicism of Dick, who becomes the central protagonist and whose mystery-- a fabrication of Rosemary's youthful delusion-- is disassembled piece by piece. Dick and Nicole's history is chronicled in a piecemeal and fairly nonlinear unfolding of darkness and earnest efforts to overcome it, from the apex of their love to its eventual dissolution amid a lifetime of jealousies, quiet betrayals, and mental ghosts. The characterization of Nicole is modelled heavily on Zelda Fitzgerald, so a biographically savvy reader will have some idea of what to expect. The plot is a slow downward march, with its own peaks and valleys of course, from naive love and youthful confidence to a more crudely honest perspective and a jaded pessimism. It's depressing as heck to read, but Fitzgerald paints even the darkest moments in the most haunting of expressions, capturing the strange sad loveliness of failure and time and sickness.
Having been the other half to a mind afflicted by (much less serious but nevertheless impacting) mental illness, parts of the book were devastatingly real, to the extent that I'd have to take emotional breaks from reading it. Although I was captivated by the slow-motion train wreck before me, at times it read far too much like a mirror for comfort. But I think this is one of the qualities I enjoyed so immensely about the novel: it's inherently uncomfortable, fragments of broken private (real) lives laid bare in living poetry, daring the reader to look away. We know we should avert our gazes, but we can't. Fitzgerald captures that self-aware sense of unease in every chilling metaphor, every calculated collection of syllables, every snippet of dialogue giving us an untainted view of such lives, knowing that we won't look away until the last stitch of those lives has been undone.
It was stunning literature, very carefully crafted, and I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to feel.