[219] Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So you understand my relations with Nicole are complicated. She’s not very strong—she looks strong but she isn’t. And this makes rather a mess.” [75]

While The Great Gatsby, with its tragic and monetary allure, is wildly popular with critics and public alike, Tender is the Night is in my opinion more substantial in the extent to which Fitzgerald explores the complication of human nature. The dark novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst, who marries the beautiful and wealthy Nicole Warren, a patient of his.

Beneath the grace and sophistication of the Divers’ high life, whom at the beginning of the novel are surrounded by a circle of American friends at the luxury villa in Southern France are cracks of their emotionally imbalanced marriage. The young starlet Rosemary Hoyt, who also vacations with her mother, has not only fallen in love with Dick at the first sight, but also discerns all that is wrong about Dick’s relationship with Nicole. While her young and naive eyes celebrate the Divers, whose villa she views as the center of the world, Rosemary’s perspective of what the Divers seem to be, the delusion of a happy marriage, will accentuate Dick Diver’s decadence.

Dick had no suspicion of the sharpness of the change; he was profoundly unhappy and the subsequent increase of egotism tended momentarily to blind him to what was going on about him… [86]

As the history of Dick Diver ominously unfolds, one will see that he has married Nicole Warren, who has suffered from a nervous breakdown following an incestuous relationship with her father, as part of her cure is a huge mistake. His flaw lays in the fact that he does not leave a self-protective professional detachment and coldness at the beginning, when Dick seems more a father figure to Nicole. The treatment that he prescribes for her has quickly entrapped him, throwing him on the road to destruction.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. [180]

. . . he had never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own men, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. [201]

The irony is that Dick’s preventive measure on Nicole’s disintegration has rendered himself the more debilitating partner. He has progressively failed in what he attempts while Nicole becomes stronger and realizes she is not in love with him. In other word, Nicole is becoming stronger at the expense of Dick’s fall. Written at the time when Fitzgerald’s wife’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that she had to be hospitalized in a sanitarium on Lake Geneva, the book makes inquiries on human soul condition and visualizes people not in their immediate setting. The novel, with its contemplative prose that is beautiful but occasionally hard going, continues the legacy of The Great Gatsby in exploring how money corrupts and destroys wealthy individuals who cannot focus their lives.

313 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]