For years, I ignored Fitzgerald. I’m not sure why other than for the sake of being contrarian. There’s a frenzy around him, I was hesitant to read him. Tender is his fourth and final novel while he was alive, and it was the book he thought would solidify his spot as a great writer, it would be the ‘great American novel’ that so many twentieth-century writers set out to write. But, upon release, many critics ripped it apart as weak and forgettable. Confused by the reception, Fitzgerald went as far as ripping apart a copy and rearranging it, an effort to fix whatever shortcomings critics had noted. His eagerness to fix the novel is indicative of where Fitzgerald was in his life by the time he wrote Tender – Zelda was institutionalized, and his alcoholism was worsening. It’s impossible to read Fitzgerald without noticing the parallels to his own life, and Tender is a quiet unraveling of love and life.
Synopsis: “Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s harrowing demise.”
Fitzgerald’s work is always well-written, but his writing in Tender is mature, honed, and precise. What Fitzgerald does particularly well is develop his character through nuanced interactions, many revelations come through interactions with others – the way Dick moves through society and then, years later, destructs relationships in a moment that were once so carefully curated. Tender underscores Fitzgerald’s increased disillusionment, the admiration for the wealth and glitz of his generation withdrawing from his grasp. The novel reads like a sad love letter to what could’ve been if people weren’t so fallible.
Tender’s tone is wistful for pages and pages and then descends into a cringey-pit-in-the-stomach awareness that the characters in its pages are doomed to fail in some way.
Quotes:
“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged–the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
“I don’t ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.”
“But some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
“He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.”
“She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.”
Read It Like Rory 