A review by rebekah_nobody
Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.0
This was the first Fitzgerald book I read because Gatsby the Great was perpetually checked out of Newton County library in the late 1990s. I was maybe 13 years old.
I remember the beginning scenes clearest of all - how I related to the character of Rosemary, being inexperienced and young, and appreciated this notion of “falling in love” with a family as a whole, or with a grown woman who is loved by a grown man, as a natural precursor to growing up.
I cannot overstate how shaken I was by the book - by the frank urgencies of need among adults, by the prodigious potential and quick disintegration of their professional and personal lives, and by the basic impermanence of ‘sanity’ in the human mind.
It seemed to be about the abundance of decay - the many mortalities of life, including the death of innocence, of marriage, and of brilliant careers… I still think of it as groundbreaking in this way, though it may have only been breaking ground in my mind, not in literary circles or history as a whole.
I remember the beginning scenes clearest of all - how I related to the character of Rosemary, being inexperienced and young, and appreciated this notion of “falling in love” with a family as a whole, or with a grown woman who is loved by a grown man, as a natural precursor to growing up.
I cannot overstate how shaken I was by the book - by the frank urgencies of need among adults, by the prodigious potential and quick disintegration of their professional and personal lives, and by the basic impermanence of ‘sanity’ in the human mind.
It seemed to be about the abundance of decay - the many mortalities of life, including the death of innocence, of marriage, and of brilliant careers… I still think of it as groundbreaking in this way, though it may have only been breaking ground in my mind, not in literary circles or history as a whole.