Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful read, lush language and a real grasp of human life
Review: I think that this book is definitely the most beautifully written book I have ever read. The settings are gorgeous and well-crafted; F. Scott takes us to the Riviera and whoosh- we're there. I also found the characters to be remarkably well-crafted, just like people you would meet at some wealthy socialite's house
Rating: 
Summary: Not great
Review: I found the book rather difficult to rea
Rating: 
Summary: An American Classic
Review: Sometimes a writer doesn't just capture a place in time, but manages to capture that place for all times. F. Scott Fitzgerald is THE quintessential chronicler of the roaring twenties. Like 'The Great Gatsby', 'Tender is the Night' is about tragedy at the heart of the American dream. The novel delves into his rocky marriage, both of their affairs, the ongoing mental illness of his wife along with his own alcoholism. This semi-autobiographical novel is an intimate portrait of the peak of both of their lives together and what comes after it. His style of writing is so complex yet easy to follow and conveys feelings and emotions with a truly subtle perfection. Some author's voices continue to endure and this book is more proof positive as to why Fitzgerald's does....
Rating:
Summary: matters of opinion and personal taste
Review: If you are considering reading a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels I would highly recommend the chronological approach, so that you can see his style develop from his graduation from Princeton to his untimely death.
Scott published little that is not deserving of 5 stars...such titles as This Side of Paradise, A Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, etc, etc, etc, and of course Tender is the Night...what a fine piece of work! Whether you prefer one of Fitz's novels, novellas, or short stories to others, I think, is a matter of time and place... For each person who truly makes the effortless effort to enjoy the man's writing, you will find a love of letters and a brooding look at lives of the young from a time not unlike this one.
Tender is great stuff! Read it! I personally have never been exstatic about Gatsby, it is unfortunately over analyzed in high school classes thus cheapening it...those less often raped by stupid teachers such as TITN are more interesting to read and think about.
Rating: 
Summary: pretty disjointed
Review: Notwithstanding the outstanding quality of Fitzgerald's other novels, this one is definitely not a must read. The plot drags along wearily at places, settings and places are not always well captured (Fitzgerald's sketch of the Riviera life does not really convince me), characters are weakly drawn, undecisive, some caricatures. The life of the main protagonists of the story does not offer enough interest in order to keep the reader interested in them for such a long novel. Except maybe you are specifically interested in psychiatrist maladies. It is neither a tragedy nor a humorous book nor just a tantalizing story, but an unsuccessful mixture of all three. Read The Great Gatsby to get the best of Fitzgerald. The book spent three years on my shelf after being bought and having read the first 30 something pages, and justly so.
Rating:
Summary: a legitimate and very human tragedy:
Review: I liked Tender is the Night even more than I expected to. As a fan of a few of his other works (notably The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise and The Collected Short Stories), I went into this book with a healthy enthusiasm. . . What I discovered was a story that was painful to watch unfold and one that kept me engaged and interested in what was happening from the first page to the end.
It tells the tale of Dick Diver, his wife Nicole, and numerous other equally complicated individuals who sway in and out of their lives over the years following World War One and just prior to the rise of Adolph Hitler. Americans living in or around Paris and the resort spots of France, these are rich people, people so rich that their money has literally destroyed them. They have become those rare people who don't have to wish for anything physical, whether it comes in the dream of a mansion on a hill in some far away country, a group of friends that includes royalty and movie stars, or sexual conquests with anyone you can even momentarily desire. All their dreams have, or could possibly on a whim, come true. And so there is nothing in this life left for them . . .
It is a sad tale of likable people coming unglued, of seeing their lives destroyed and watching nobody care, regardless of their goodness. It is a story of absolute and utter desolation, finally, as the almost journalistic ending comes at you. It is like falling out of touch with someone who was once the most important person in your life, hearing vague stories about what they are up to and realizing they are getting fainter and fainter and fainter . . .
This was quite obviously a very personal book for its author, a disillusioned man who saw many of his own dreams come true early on and who was left to watch his own joy turn into boredom and finally complete indifference. This book is the nightmare that all of us hope never comes true. It is somewhat comforting, in the end, to realize that in spite of his own early death, his crazy wife and his alcoholism, F. Scott Fitzgerald's story isn't anywhere near as terrible as this one.
It is, among a multitude, one of the better books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Pompous prose but pretty plot
Review: I am puzzled by readers who found the plot lacking but loved the prose. I was entranced by the story which enabled me to slog through the turgid, and pretentious writing. While I prefer the Great Gatsby where the writing is crystal clear compared to Tender's murkiness the plot of Tender Is The Night for me is unforgettable. I remember it from my first reading when my childhood memories of a family vacation in the mid 1930's in Switzerland and on the French Riviera were sharper than they are today. I am infuriated by the Divers' snobbery and condescension toward people who were not members of their self appointed inner circle, not to mention their racism. Yet I am moved by Dick and Nicole's love story. Rosemary's presence and her mother's role in her life and love affair are puzzling and I can only justify their inclusion as a tool to demonstrate how much the Divers were admired, but why? They were shallow people with shallow interests and equally shallow friends. Dick's acclaimed politness might be praiseworthy but what else did he have to recommend him? In the end even that quality disappeared in the most dramatic way.They weren't even good parents. The children's care was left to hired help, but I guess that was de rigueur among the upper classes of the time. The first part of the book was the weakest with especially florid almost impenetrable prose. Where was Hemingway when Fitzgerald needed him? Part 2 was a big improvement. The scenes at the clinic near Lausanne were well constructed and the dialogue rang true. The good Swiss doctor and his wife were believable. The dying patient with the tormenting skin condition was exactly as I remembered her from my first reading of the book so long ago. Dick's gradual disintegration is troubling while Nicole's ascent toward self-reliance and freedom is uplifting. It's ironic that the story's denouement foretells Scott's own tragic ending while Nicole's happy life with a new husband in no way resembles Zelda's later years. Zelda perished in a fire which destroyed the mental hospital in which she had been confined. So much about Dick and Nicole angered me. But they were creatures of their age and social milieu and they were well captured in this book. Fitzgerald portrayed the glamour, the cynicism, and the smugness of a certain type of wealthy American better than almost any other writer of that era. The weariness of living life in an alcoholic haze has been depicted more graphically by other authors but not in posh locales Fitzgerald made so real. You can almost hear a Cole Porter melody as you read about these ghosts of the roaring 20's and the wraiths of the troubled 30's. A good period piece if you want to learn about that era which is rather dear to this old lady's heart.
Rating:
Summary: Feet Of Clay, A House Of Cards, A Bubble Burst
Review: Written with difficulty over a period of nine years, Tender Is The Night (1934), the last novel F. Scott Fitzgerald published during his lifetime, was something of a critical and commercial failure upon its release at the height of the Depression. Though it has had many prominent public admirers over the decades, the book is a dull, strained, and rambling failure concerned with transparent, narcissistic characters, who, in a later era, might have comfortably stepped out of any of Sidney Sheldon' novels.
Tender Is The Night is sadly shorn of the maniacal spontaneity of initial Fitzgerald novel This Side of Paradise (1920) and the depth that the first person narrative provided in The Great Gatsby (1925). Though the peripheral characters find protagonists Dr. Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole, to be dazzling, irresistible, and dynamic, on the page they are so blandly drawn that each is barely discernable from the rest of the equally nondescript cast. Diver, who is supposed to be a reputable psychiatrist, simply appears like a slightly more dapper cad among cads, and something of a fool.
The lives of these affluent men and women seem empty indeed; when not flattering one another or merrily drawing a firm line of exclusivity between themselves and the rest of humanity, the characters amuse themselves by making cutting and sardonic remarks about the hoi polloi. Shallow good manners, rather than substantive values, fuel their lives. The extroverted Dick and Nicole Diver are initially portrayed as compulsive socializers who are locked into their public personas, which fit them as snugly as straight jackets; left alone together, the silence is deafening and the minutes yawn. As if suffering an ethical failure, Fitzgerald appears to hold his unlikable characters and their lifestyles in high esteem, a factor that finally damns the book completely, since the collapse of Diver's sunlit house of cards is meant to represent a poignant tragedy.
Though some scholars believe that struggling Depression audiences simply weren't capable of focusing on a novel about the lives of the wealthy, the more probable reason is that the book is unenjoyable and feels concocted and self conscious at every turn. And with good reason: during the period in which the book was written, Fitzgerald continually rearranged the novel' plot, theme, and focus as his own life became increasingly troubled and unsettled. This uneven patchwork approach is evident in both large and small ways, such as when naive but poised Hollywood ingenue Rosemary leaves a party and is inexplicably "shaken with audibly painful sobs," though four short, uneventful paragraphs later on the same page, Fitzgerald writes, "it was time for Rosemary to cry," apparently forgetting that Rosemary is crying already. Throughout Book One, Fitzgerald moves haphazardly from vaguely - conceived scene to scene, overwriting but still failing to include the essential, and thus allowing what little credible plot there is to evaporate like a mirage. Contrived set pieces involving a duel, a railway shooting, and a murder in a hotel - none of which add anything pertinent the plot - suggest that Fitzgerald simply didn't know how to proceed or express what he wanted to say.
Throughout Book One, the omnipresent narrator's point of view, like the characters whose story he relates, is pretentious and smugly inauthentic; Abe North's mouth, for example, is characterized in terms of its "inability to endure boredom," while in another scene, the group, eyeing the casual behavior of strangers, discusses the reasons why Diver "is the only sober man" in the world capable of "repose," a quality they apparently hold in inestimable regard. When Diver is briefly accosted by a strange man while waiting on a Paris street corner, rather than state this plainly, Fitzgerald writes, "After three - quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact." Though a discernable plot remains elusive and the characters are ghostly and insubstantial, Fitzgerald repeatedly focuses on the extraneous: when Diver scribbles out a check drawn from questionable funds, Fitzgerald writes, "As he wrote he engrossed himself in the material act, examining meticulously the pen, writing laboriously upon the high glass-topped desk."
The more prosaically written Book Two reveals that Fitzgerald had little genuine insight or hard knowledge about psychology, despite references to Freud, Jung, Bleuler, and Adler, though he continues to offer poorly expressed pseudo - philosophical insights such as "He knew, though, that the price of his intactness was incompleteness." Not only does Fitzgerald make the common mistake of identifying schizophrenia as "split personality," but the closest the author comes in attempting to describe mental illness is "a cousin happened upon her mad and gone." As if hoping to correct the structural errors of the first section, Book Two compresses so much explicit activity in its pages that events degenerate into a series of convenient and unbelievable coincidences. There are passages of unintentional hilarity, such as "He was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York. He just managed to crawl home to the Racquet Club to die," suggesting that even on the very lip of perdition, Fitzgerald's diehard characters are snobs to the end.
With Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald played an ostensibly clever, dangerous, and deceptive game. The omnipresent narrator's point of view in Book One is clearly colored by Rosemary's naive and idealized perception of the Divers, thus making the objective truth about the couple impossible to ascertain. Book Two, which adopts an entirely more factual tone, then peels away the false glamour and purports to reveal the rot beneath the shimmering surface. But Rosemary's presence doesn't explain Book One's narrative pretensions or the manner in which Fitzgerald has misled the reader in an attempt to produce what he calculates will later become a tragically ironic effect. But since the lives the Divers appear to lead in Book One is spurious at best, Fitzgerald's gambit falls flat.
Rating:
Summary: Well written but REALLY boring
Review: To be blunt, there is no plot. I hate to be overly critical, but if Herman Schwartz (ficticious name) had written this novel, it never would have seen a printing press. What I mean by "well written" is that you will be able to identify the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly a talented writer. His phraseology is excellent and insightfull (hence the extra star). The problem is that there really isn't much of a story here. If this book is sold on audio, it should come with a warning to not drive while listening as it could cause the listener to slip into a coma while driving! Basically, it chronicles much of his own life with his wife who also struggled with mental illness, much like the wife of Dick in the story. Ernest Hemingway held the novel in high regard, but his opinion was biased as he enjoyed a close friendship with Fitzgerald. The esteemed Mr. Fitzgerald would have done much better to confine his struggles to a diary away from the public. As such a capable writer, he could have done much better than this. Final analysis: boring and disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Gatsby but still unconvincing
Review: I was expecting to like this book more, and only checked it out because the library didn't have 'The Great Gatsby.' I liked this book more than Gatsby, but after having read both of them, I feel it's about as undeveloped and unconvincing as Fitzgerald's more famous work.I really liked Part One, but things really went south in Part Two. I really didn't see how Rosemary fit into the plot at all; she's this big-name rising starlet who is instantly warmly and closely befriended by all of Dick and Nicole's adult friends when they're in France, and she and Dick are mutually attracted to one another, an attraction strongly encouraged by Rosemary's mother. Unless there's something going on between the lines that I failed to see, this didn't seem like anything more than a young girl with a crush on an older married man, a crush that doesn't go much farther than some secret rendezvous where they don't do anything more than kiss, hold one another, and say sweet nothings. Then she drops out of their lives and doesn't appear again till close to the end, where she and Dick are talking like they shared some affair. How could the brief appearance of a young girl disrupt Dick and Nicole's marriage so much, esp. since they never even slept together? This is just like a lot of books with alleged affairs or love stories which are never given any motivation or credibility, explaining why these two people are attracted to one another and would want to leave an existing relationship for this new dangerous one. It really insults the reader's intelligence. Besides the alleged love story, the character development of Dick and Nicole were also really wanting. We know that Nicole has been psychologically unstable anyway since she was a young girl (indeed, she and Dick met while he was treating her in a mental hospital), but there's no insight into why she goes back to her old unglued ways. Her behaviour doesn't even seem that out of control, just erratic and a bit strange. We also get no insight into why Dick also starts on a course towards his own mental breakdown. I had no understanding of why they began acting that way; why should I consider him the hero and root for him when I'm given no insight into his condition, no explanation or rationale for his behaviour, and when he doesn't want to deal with his wife's serious problems, who indeed even worsens them? There were also a few pointless and dead-end subplots, like Abe North's problems in Paris and the incident towards the end involving Mary North and Lady Sibley-Beers. The edition I read also had a lot of untranslated French passages, as though everyone still speaks French as a second language or even speaks it more often than their native tongue. Those days are gone, and there's no need to belabour the point by having whole conversations in French when the reader knows that they're in France and speaking to French people. The end of the book was also a big dead-end. The story was interesting, just not convincing, realistic, or believable.
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