Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald

This novel is digested much better with a bit of background, and since I'm hosting the book club this week I kind of have to do it anyway.  Fitzgerald wrote 4 novels [and a ton of short stories] over the course of his life, with the fifth being unfinished and published posthumously.

This Side of Paradise, 1920
The Beautiful and the Damned, 1922
The Great Gatsby, 1925 [Read & loved]
Tender is the Night, 1934 [Read & digesting]
The Last Tycoon, 1941 [Read & loved]

I like to look at the years that the books were published, to see how much time it takes to complete a work and get a sense of what's happening in the time period.  The book was written pre-WWII, but right in the middle of the Great Depression which started in 1929 and ended in the mid thirties.

[SPOILERS BELOW]
The book chronicled the lives of Dick and Nicole Diver, who purchase a villa in the French Riviera some time after their marriage.  The couple meets a bunch of Americans on the beach, including Rosemary, an 18 year old actress.  Rosemary falls in love with Dick and Dick reciprocates this affection, despite being twice her age.  This occurs in the first part of three parts of the novel.  The second part deals with how Dick and Nicole met.  Nicole was abused by her father and was sent to a psychiatric ward.  She had met Dick on a previous occurrence and fell in love with him.  During her recovery, Dick and Nicole sent mail back and forth and eventually, after she made it out of the clinic, they wed.  There is a lot of talk in the novel about if Dick married for love or for science, but in my opinion, it was love and just devolved into science.  Dick is a psychiatrist, and after he gets married he goes through a stint of unemployment after a failed clinic in Switzerland.

The third part takes us back to the present.  Dick meets Rosemary again four years later and they consummate their love.  It happens to be a one time thing though, as Rosemary is not the same in Dick's head as in reality.  Meanwhile, Nicole chooses Tommy, a friend, as an outlet for her life... and they end up cheating in a motel.  Tommy falls in love with her (I'm not sure the feeling is reciprocal) and Nicole leaves Dick.  Dick wanders alone aimlessly, in and out of employment... battling his own personal demons.

[SPOILERS END]
Like a ton of good 'fiction', this novel is partly autobiographical.  Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1932.  Fitzgerald rented an estate ('la Paix') on the most expensive street in Paris.  He ran out of money several times, according to Wikipedia, and had to borrow money several times to complete the work.

The book deals with the concept of love.  There is a point in the novel (~pg 336) where it states that Dick just wanted to be loved.  I sympathize with this part of Diver's character... because I understand how it can jumble you up inside.  Nick tried to stick with his morals, but he fell out of love with Nicole and then resented the state of affairs that his life had amounted to.  Nicole was doomed from the start, and it's really a wonder she did as well as she did despite being abused as a child.  Rosemary never seemed to grow up.  The characters, as some critics state, are not well-described but I believe you get a sense for who they are... unless they're kind of frivolous characters which are alluded to briefly and can get jumbled up in your memory due to the lack of descriptions (if I recall correctly, this is the same as in "The Great Gatsby").

Fitzgerald uses some beautiful prose throughout the work, and despite not being memorable quotations, they are just beautifully crafted sentences.  In addition, there was some good humour used including a piece about a psychiatrist spending years of his life working on the complexities of something so minor (an armadillo's brain) just so he could do something 'different', only to find out that someone was doing the same thing in another part of the world.  The humour is sparse and subtle, but made me smile at times.

There were a couple of murders in this book, and they really weren't explained well and had virtually no ramifications on the book.  One broke up a possible episode between Dick and Rosemary, but the situation was never explained.  I'm sure that Fitzgerald had a reason for it, but it took away from the focus of the book, in my opinion.

On the whole, the book didn't impress me that much, but it's something that I think will benefit from a good book club discussion.  I've read some lovely reviews from Amazon that made me feel as if I should have fallen in love with the book, but I really just fell in love with the review.  On the whole, I enjoyed the story but didn't ever feel like I was really into it.  I wanted to be, but I felt that this Fitzgerald work was the least enjoyable and memorable of the three I have currently read.


Some Interesting Notes:
The novel is ranked 28th on the Modern Library's List of 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. 

The title "Tender is the Night" is a line from a poem from John Keats wrote in 1819 called "Ode to a Nightingale":

tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (lines 35–40)

From Wikipedia: "Two versions of this novel are in print. The first version, published in 1934, uses flashbacks whilst the second revised version, prepared by Fitzgerald's friend and noted critic Malcolm Cowley on the basis of notes for a revision left by Fitzgerald, is ordered chronologically; this version was first published posthumously in 1951. Critics have suggested that Cowley's revision was undertaken due to negative reviews of the temporal structure of the book on its first release."

Book Beginnings | Friday, July 23

On every Friday, Page Turners posts a message asking for others to send a link to the opening sentence of a the novel that they are currently reading.  I just came across this, so I guess I missed out on last week but here goes for today.

The opening line from "Tender is the Night":

"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half-way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel."

First off, due to the spelling of "coloured", it's obvious that this is a Canadian edition.  Secondly, while this opening line is pleasant, it never really stuck with me and now that I'm about 70 pages from the end, I can't say that it does anything for me looking back except to tell me where all of this hullabaloo started [not chronologically, but in the story].  However, I do really enjoy the idea of a proud hotel, ignoring the concept of proud people within a hotel [which does nothing for me].

The Last Tycoon | F. Scott Fitzgerald

I won't give anything away, in this post about Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon." For those of you who don't already know, Fitzgerald passed away before completing this novel... and from everything that I could tell, it would have been a masterpiece. It was so good in fact, that I believe it would have eclipsed "The Great Gatsby."

Despite being a rough draft, every word was meticulously chosen and all had an underlying purpose. While I don't believe Fitzgerald had the ability to paint a picture as beautiful as Hemingway, he was still able to use words in such a way that you would feel breathless. I don't know how anyone reads novels anymore. Fitzgerald, in my opinion, was one of the last great authors.

That being said, the novel is about a man who essentially runs all the ins and outs of the Hollywood film industry. He has a hand in all major and minor problems, and the novel is an accurate portrayal of the future of not only the motion picture business, but of the world itself. I strongly suggest those of you with a passion for literature to read this novel... it will show you how far off track a lot of authors have gone, in present day. Also interesting is Fitzgerald's notes, which give you insight into where the story was headed... and how the author prepared for writing his novels.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes:

"We didn't get the full shock like at Long Beach, where the upper sotries of shops were spewed into the streets and small hotels drifted out to sea - but for a full minute our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth - like some nightmare attempt to attach our navel cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation."

"He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the darkness, looking, I suppose, a little like the Emperor and the Old Guard. There is no world so but it has its heroes, and Stahr was the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time - through the beginnings and the great upset, when sound came, and the three years of depression, he had seen that no harm came to them. The old loyalties were trembling now, there were clay feet everywhere; but still he was their man, the last of the princes. And their greating was a sort of low cheer as they went by."

"Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would ever consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. I'm ashamed of having to tell you these kindergarten facts, but they have somehow leaked out of the story."

"I noticed the girl long before Stahr arrived at the dance. Not a pretty girl, for there are none of those in Los Angelas - one girl can be pretty, but a dozen are only a chorus. Nor yet a professional beauty - they do all the breathing for everyone, and finally even the men have to go outside for air. Just a girl, with the skin of one of Raphael's corner angels and a style that made you look back twice to see if it were something she had on."

"They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world."

"They started back along the shore with the sun behind them. The house seemed kindlier when they left it, as if warmed by their visit."

"In love with Minna and death together - with the world in which she looked so alone that he wanted to go with her there."

"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."

"Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness."

...
"People fall in and out of love all the time, don't they?"

"Every three years or so, Fanny Brice says. I just read it in the paper."

"I wonder how they manage it," he said. "I kknow it's true because I see them. But they looked so convinced every time. And then suddenly they don't look convinced. But they get convinced all over."
...

"The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars." (see photo)