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Book Review: Tender is the Night
Feb. 28th, 2025 01:58 pmIn my freshman year of high school, we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The rest of the class was not impressed, but I loved it.
Ten years passed. I was slowly making inroads into classic literature, and since I’d loved The Great Gatsby so much, I decided to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. (He only finished four.) I read This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, and then, crushing between the aimless floating ennui depicted in the two novels, decided I would circle back around for the fourth book later.
Ten more years passed. “Later” finally arrived, and at long last I’ve read Tender is the Night. It turns out that this is also a depiction of aimless floating ennui, in which the promising young psychologist Dick Diver fails in all his promise because (a) he married a patient and taking care of her takes up his time, (b) said patient is super rich so he doesn’t actually have to work, (c) but then Dick buys an interest in a Swiss sanitarium so he is working and that seems to be what really unravels him?
Or else it’s his affair with the dazzling young movie star Rosemary Hoyt, which begins rather puzzlingly after they’ve both fallen out of love with each other. Okay. Why not, I guess.
Anyway, the combined weight of intermittently insane wife/unearned riches/working at the asylum/having an affair drive Dick to drink. And then more drink. And then he starts drinking on the job sometimes, and on a trip he gets in a fight with a taxi driver, which leads to a fight with the police, in which he thinks he loses an eye but it seems like maybe he doesn’t but Fitzgerald never totally clears up this point.
Meanwhile, Nicole has an affair with another man, who tells Dick that Dick and Nicole are getting divorced, and Nicole is healed and goes off to marry the other man and is no longer Dick’s problem, and Dick goes back to America and appears to be in the process of drinking himself into less and less prestigious posts as a doctor. The end.
Sometimes as a young person one makes foolish vows and “I’m going to read all of Fitzgerald’s novels!” may have been one of them, but hey, at least he only wrote four. I’m all done!
Ten years passed. I was slowly making inroads into classic literature, and since I’d loved The Great Gatsby so much, I decided to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. (He only finished four.) I read This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, and then, crushing between the aimless floating ennui depicted in the two novels, decided I would circle back around for the fourth book later.
Ten more years passed. “Later” finally arrived, and at long last I’ve read Tender is the Night. It turns out that this is also a depiction of aimless floating ennui, in which the promising young psychologist Dick Diver fails in all his promise because (a) he married a patient and taking care of her takes up his time, (b) said patient is super rich so he doesn’t actually have to work, (c) but then Dick buys an interest in a Swiss sanitarium so he is working and that seems to be what really unravels him?
Or else it’s his affair with the dazzling young movie star Rosemary Hoyt, which begins rather puzzlingly after they’ve both fallen out of love with each other. Okay. Why not, I guess.
Anyway, the combined weight of intermittently insane wife/unearned riches/working at the asylum/having an affair drive Dick to drink. And then more drink. And then he starts drinking on the job sometimes, and on a trip he gets in a fight with a taxi driver, which leads to a fight with the police, in which he thinks he loses an eye but it seems like maybe he doesn’t but Fitzgerald never totally clears up this point.
Meanwhile, Nicole has an affair with another man, who tells Dick that Dick and Nicole are getting divorced, and Nicole is healed and goes off to marry the other man and is no longer Dick’s problem, and Dick goes back to America and appears to be in the process of drinking himself into less and less prestigious posts as a doctor. The end.
Sometimes as a young person one makes foolish vows and “I’m going to read all of Fitzgerald’s novels!” may have been one of them, but hey, at least he only wrote four. I’m all done!
