Tender Is the Night
Fitzgerald's most autobiographical novel. Dick and Nicole Diver's marriage on the French Riviera, its beauty and its disintegration. A love story about the corrosive effects of wealth and illness on passion; the tenderness of the title is the tenderness of something that was real and is being slowly consumed. Fitzgerald at his most honest.
Fitzgerald tells the story from a shifting cast of vantage points, often within the same scene, and detractors call the effect jarring rather than purposeful: one reader jokes “you could read the chapters in random order” without losing much. Dick Diver's fall from magnetic golden boy to alcoholic wreck strikes several as unconvincing, and his passivity as a psychiatrist who rarely asks a real question undercuts the premise for them. The supporting cast reads flat and interchangeable to more than one reviewer, and a subplot involving a shooting and a duel never gets folded into the main story. One critic sums up the strain between ambition and execution as a “dizzying disparity between form and content,” and others dismiss the whole enterprise as “triviality made coherent.” The ending fades rather than resolves, and the book gets compared unfavorably to Gatsby's tighter construction throughout.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
