Tender is the Night

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The tricky thing about hitting a reading stride and identifying what has shifted in your reading habits to flare it up, is that it’s then difficult to actively keep that fire going. After finishing The Hiding Place, I was positively feverish with wanting to keep this reading-run going but also conscious that it would probably stall if I went back to fantasy. I’d already done cosy, Japanese fiction, non-fiction, and dark drama, where do you go next? I decided to try and go back to the 1001 project and add another classic to my repertoire and went with F. Scott Fitzgerald. But this proved to be a risky move, as the feverish desire to constantly be reading started to sputter. My partner bringing home our next bookclub book was a saving act and for a week I had 2 books on the go and the fever flared. It just goes to show that a healthy reading diet works best (at least for me) when there is variety and the habits are subject to a shakeup.

Having powered through The Thornbacks, finishing it just in time to have it signed by the author at the Headland Writer’s Festival over the weekend, I was then able to dive back into Tender is the Night with renewed vigour and, a week later, I have closed the cover on it.

Young and beautiful film actress Rosemary Hoyt is holidaying in the French Riviera with her mother where she meets American psychologist Doctor Dick Diver and his wealthy wife Nicole, also a patient of his. Rosemary quickly falls in love with Dick when she is brought into the couple’s circle of wealth, high society, intellect, and excess, and he falls in love with her. But in the fast-paced era of the 1920’s while one can have it all, it does not last forever, and disaster strikes when a friend of the Divers’ kills a man in a drunk-driving accident and Nicole has a nervous breakdown. As the harsh realities of war, post-traumatic stress, and socioeconomic divides hammer at Rosemary and the Divers over the years, it becomes apparent that even the American Dream is one that will eventually be woken from.

I have determined that I have not read enough Fitzgerald, nor read it deeply enough to absorb everything in his books in a singular reading. But the wonderful thing about his works is that they do inspire the odd revisit. Tender is the Night is semi-autobiographical with the Divers being based on a true couple that Scott and Zelda knew, as well as the expensive psychological treatments being ones that Zelda sought in Switzerland.

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Like The Great Gatsby, the book plunges readers into this vibrant and excessive world of the Roaring ‘20s where money and social standing entitled people, particularly Americans, to engage in the most terrible behaviour. The book explores absolutely everything from loss of innocence to the degradation of morality, to the shifting nature of relationships, to finally leaving the reader with the deliciously melancholy thought that true happiness, while attainable, is not meant to last forever.

Fitzgerald’s prose tells a lot but hides even more and the book really is like being caught in this insanely glamorous yet turbulent whirlwind of bacchanal, drama, and ambition. And while extravagant and over-stimulating, it’s a beautiful, sad, and compelling story filled with characters that inspire complicated reader-character relationships. I was certainly swept away by it.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934

Published, C. Schribner’s Sones, New York, 1934