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Tender Is the Night, in detail
Tender Is the Night follows Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, and his wife Nicole — a former patient he married — as they host and dazzle a circle of wealthy expatriates on the French Riviera in the 1920s. When Rosemary Hoyt, a young American actress, arrives and falls in love with Dick, the novel begins the slow, meticulous documentation of his unraveling. Over the following years, Dick dissipates his gifts, drinks, drifts from his career, and loses whatever it was that once made him magnetic. The novel ends with him retreating to small-town upstate New York, largely forgotten.
The book is less about plot than about a particular kind of failure: the gifted man who uses himself up. Dick Diver is partly Fitzgerald writing about himself — by 1934 the author was drinking heavily, and his wife Zelda had suffered a mental breakdown. The novel's central question is whether Dick is destroyed by Nicole's demands, by his own weakness, or by the leisure-class world that absorbed and corrupted him. Fitzgerald refuses a clean answer, and the ambiguity is part of what gives the book its weight. Nicole's trajectory runs opposite to Dick's: she recovers, gains autonomy, and leaves.
Stylistically this is Fitzgerald at his most ambitious and uneven. The first section, rendering the Riviera summers through Rosemary's dazzled eyes, is among the most beautiful sustained prose he wrote. The middle section, which flashes back to Dick's early career and his treatment of Nicole, is colder and more clinical. The third section, Dick's deterioration, is sometimes brilliant and sometimes labored. The novel took nine years to write and shows the strain, but the strain also gives it a rawness that Gatsby's perfection lacks.
Readers who loved Gatsby's compression may find this exhausting. It is twice as long and considerably messier. But for those interested in Fitzgerald's full range — and in a portrait of a man watching himself fail that has few equals in American fiction — it rewards the investment. Think of it as the novel Gatsby grew up to become.
The big ideas
- 1.
Dick Diver's decline is never reducible to a single cause — Nicole's illness, his own alcoholism, the corruption of leisure — and that resistance to explanation is the novel's most honest quality.
- 2.
Fitzgerald inverts the usual gender dynamic: Nicole is the patient who recovers and gains power; Dick is the caretaker who is consumed by his own caretaking.
- 3.
The Riviera in the novel is both beautiful and predatory. The expatriate leisure class is rendered with glamour and with contempt, sometimes in the same sentence.
