I love F. Scott Fitzgerald. Despite his absolutely doomed characters and disconcerting plots, he writes it all so beautifully. I want him to write my tweets and my journal entries and speak on the phone for me.

To Roy

It was nice to read a classic and the plot was interesting enough but the story didn’t really hook me. I didn’t like the relationships or how they played out. It’s not one of the classic books you want to read again and again.

well, i actually loved this. the individual portraiture of characters was strangely compelling and
believable... not because the characters are like anyone you know, but because they could be. all damaged souls, for which fitzgerald is famous. better than gatsby.

I’m still livid that a title this good was squandered on such a spiteful, self-aggrandizing, mean-spirited novel as this. The worst people you know will find honesty in it. But honesty requires personal interrogation, and Fitzgerald at this point in his life is too busy simpering and begging for the reader’s sympathies to turn his critical gaze inward. He casts himself as put-upon victim in a hermetic fantasy where he holds all the power. And his worst sin is not that he used that power irresponsibly, but that he wielded it so boringly.

Not sure why I found this, a novel I've always held up as a great disappointment, suddenly piquing at me like a specter. Or actually, I do: I began to wonder if this was a text I encountered at the wrong point of my life. And that turned out to be exactly the case, as it really does require a certain maturity & enough life experience to understand the specific type of grief one feels for a paradise lost.

If recent revisits to formative texts This Side of Paradise & The Great Gatsby was to experience something of Babylon Revisited's reckoning with the loss one's youth, then this reading of Tender is the Night felt like laughing with a teenage nemesis over a shared recognition that you'll make quite excellent friends now.

Which is not to say that this novel isn't profoundly flawed; one viscerally feels Fitzgerald's strain & eventual defeat in molding this material into the perfected forms of his best work. Long passages are gloopy, characterization are often shaky, the narrative constantly seems to lose the thread. I was profoundly uninvested in the extended mid-novel flashback into Dick Diver's past. But all these technical problems cobweb across some of the most sublimely gorgeous individual lines & paragraphs to be found in ALL literature (there were moments I gasped).

Somehow there's a profound beauty in this novel's defectiveness, the gaps somehow gesturing toward something ineffable—& ultimately profound.

Rating bumped from two stars to four.

"Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zürich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be."

While I didn't particularly enjoy the story or characters, Fitzgerald's writing makes approaching this novel worth it. There's so much beautiful literary imagery that it became hard not to write down each little gem I encountered.

The story is not nearly as compelling as The Great Gatsby, but two familiar themes emerge: the adoration and idolization of a beautiful, charasmatic man, and the disillusionment that follows. Interestingly, the same undercurrents of homosexual attention are present. Though presented through a young woman's perspective in Tender is the Night, the attention placed on the form and person of the primary male character is very similar to that of Nick on Gatsby, and it's enough to make me wonder if these characters were proxies for the author's gaze.

The characters and story are pretty flaccid. There's all the show of glamor and interest, but it's pretty boring and uneventful, even considering duels of honor, affairs, murder, etc. Halfway through the novel we change narrative perspective, bringing us more intimately into the inner workings of the primary characters. If it was Fitzgerald's intention to make commentary on the futility of beauty, riches, and notoriety, this move would make sense. But I couldn't get a read on exactly how autobiographical this novel was meant to be, and knowing the lavish lifestyle he and Zelda lived makes me wonder if insisting on commentary is a mistake.

Regardless, I'd recommend this book only to lovers of literature. The language is beautiful, even if the story and characters are lacking.