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A review by j_ata
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.0
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."
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."