Throughout the entirety of your academic career you will come across something by F. Scott Fitzgerald that you will be forced to read. Most likely, it will be his 1925 modernist classic, The Great Gatsby.
However, the brilliance of Fitzgerald does not end there.
Enter Tender is the Night, his 1934 masterpiece which takes its title from a poem by John Keats, detailing the tumultuous romance of an American expatriate couple towards the middle and continuing to the end of the 1920’s.
Upon the opening of the novel, the reader is introduced to young Rosemary Hoyt, an American film actress vacationing in the French Riviera with her mother.
Here, she meets a cast of characters ranging from socialites, gossipers, soldiers-of-fortune, and bourgeois socialists.
She also meets the young and eccentric couple, the Divers.
Made up of Dick and Nicole, the Divers eventually become the object of Rosemary’s desire—she longs to be a Nicole figure and wishes to be with Dick.
Eventually, they accept her and her mother within their circle of friends and they all have fun as only wealthy Americans in the south of France can.
If you have had the misfortune of reading the early work of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby excluded), you are probably saying to yourself, “So what? Sounds like everything else that guy wrote.”
You would be correct.
Book one of the novel is incredibly slow and lacks much of the power that made The Great Gatsby an incredible read, but the real power of the novel lies within books two and three.
Here, the reader discovers a highly complex story involving schizophrenia, sanatoriums, rescue marriages, and how all of these pertain to the meeting of Dick and Nicole.
Before you finish book two, you realize that Fitzgerald has sprung one of the greatest literary traps of all time, lulling the reader into a false sense of parlor-drama security and then springing what can only be described as a stream-of-consciousness carnival trip on literary acid.
Everything that can possibly go wrong for the characters in the book does.
Throughout the remainder of the novel, the reader witnesses the tragedy that is love, having front seats to the affair of Dick and Rosemary, the dissolution of Dick and Nicole’s marriage, and the downward spiral of Nicole into mental illness.
This sounds incredibly depressing and even somewhat off-putting, but do not back away from the novel.
This is one of the purest works by Fitzgerald, who sheds his sentimentality and juvenile attitude bringing the reader one of the greatest stories of the modernist era.
Partly what makes this book so amazing is the striking similarities between the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver and F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda Sayre.
The marriage of both sets of couples is rife with infidelity, binges of alcoholism, depraved outings in the urban centers of Europe, and a never-ending string of visits to the asylum for unrestrained mental illness.
The author referred to this work as his “confession of faith,” rejecting the standards of traditional literature to expose light on the twilight of his successful days, much to the ire of friends and critics.
Rumor has it that Ernest Hemingway accused Fitzgerald of being a weakling and told him to keep his dirty laundry private, while the Communist Party of America’s newspaper lambasted Fitzgerald for being so decadent in times of great need and economic hardship.
Despite the criticism received at the time of its release, Tender is the Night is one of the greatest American novels of the Twentieth Century.
It is undoubtedly the most honest piece of writing Fitzgerald ever accomplished, therefore placing him upon the throne of writing a truly brilliant novel.
This is nothing like any love story you have ever read.
Read this now.
Conner McDonough can be reached at cmcdonough@spartans.ut.edu.