Rating: 
Summary: Love is a tricky business
Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald is an author that represents the 20s in the US, this period where everything was crazy and rich before the Great Depression. This novel is the story of a love affair and of a career, that of Doctor Dick Diver. He is promised to a bright future as a psychiatric doctor. He marries one of the richest heiresses of America who was a patient first of all and became his wife. This love affair is described in the smallest and tiniest details. But Dick Diver comes to the point where he needs to distanciate himself from this ex-neurotic if not schizophrenic wife who was raped by her own father. Dick Diver is also extremely sollicited by many women because he is handsome and charming. He has a short-lived affair with a young Hollywood actress, Rosemary. But his wife Nicole is absolutely dependent on her love for him and cannot survive without his love. The story leads us among the circles of rich Americans and English people who mostly roams the highlighted areas of Europe, spending the money they have and that is always more than they can spend. But a breaking point builds up slowly and explodes sometime in 1927-28. He gets more and more aloof as for his job, if not frankly sloppy and finally gets out of it due to alcoholism. He gets also more and more distant from Nicole. But the real breaking point is when Nicole conquers her freedom through a liaison with another man. Then the end is inevitable : divorce and going back to America to have a general practitioner's office in the state of New York. But the book is a lot more interesting than just this picture. It shows how the very rich are living a complete dream life with caprices, good manners and civility, but no touch with the real world and how they get so far from the real world that they have to develop some kind of a screen to be protected from the fall this distance may represent : alcoholism, an artificial lifestyle and environment, spending as a daily occupation. This is in full contradiction with working to earn a living, which Dick Diver is always doing and a collapse is always at hand and it finally happens. One cannot live the contradiction between a real professional life and an artificial lifestyle. What's more interesting is that the fall comes from this very artificial lifestyle. Alcoholism is a coping strategy that dooms a professional life. Good manners and nicely controled love affairs are also in contradiction with a family life (the doctor has two children) and a professional life. So one day it has to break. Thus the night of the title has many meanings : the nightlife of this detached society, the shadow of all the little affairs and liaisons that remain unrealised or hardly realised, the night of the movie theater since the cinema is always in the background, the night of the end of a love affair, a passion, the night of a lost career. And Doctor Dick Diver submits to this gentle slope going down slowly, to this coming night as if it were a liberation from the obligations of this artificial life. He goes back to reality and gets lost in the night of the unknown, unknown at least for the members of this artificial society of over-rich kids who never grow up. Finally it is a style in the book : every detail is always draped in some kind of shadow, in some kind of night that helps any contradiction and evolution to exist and to survive any kind of crisis.
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Summary: Tender Writing Indeed!
Review: Tender is the Night is a somewhat lengthy, meandering sort of novel. Its facination comes from this very obscurity; a tightly written mystery-murder(The Great Gatsby) it is not. I highly recommend this book for its vivid portrayal of Diver's complexly layered relationships; with Nicole his wife, and with the budding starlet, Rosemary.
The author skillfully shuffles in the minor characters as well. FitzGerald's observations about the psychology between women and men /Americans and Europeans is ultra keen. His father's death, Abe North's death, his and Rosemary's quick but temporary liason, the fight with the Police in Rome, the illness of Mr. Warren, his parting with Franz and Kaethe, the antagonism between Baby and himself, the mental and emotional drain of Nicole's affliction, and his drinking... portray the minor tragedies that constitute life.
FitzGerald tells his story to us better than any other 20th Century American writer could hope to, and in a lyrical style that keeps the reader spellbound.
Rating: 
Summary: Different than Gatsby, but as good
Review: After finishing this book I was reminded of a beautiful grand house - if you take it in its entirety, you can't help but admire it. Within, there may be some rooms that leave something to be desired, but the overall effect is breathtaking. So it is with this book. Fitzgerald manages to write a story about a relationship that manages to be acerbicand tender at the same time. Like the other traditional inheritor of the 'Great American Novelist' title, Hemmingway. Fitzgerald combines a genius for writing wonderful character insights with great 'background painting' - some of his descriptions of settings are truly masterpieces. Even the 'extras' - they don't have anything to do with the story so it is hard to call them characters - get wonderfully drawn descriptions. I feel that this book truly captures its age and place. And the added bonus - this is a wonderful insight into a relationship built on the worst of foundations slowly but surely heading to its end, told to us from various viewpoints. I don't know much about Fitzgerald's life, but if this is semi-autobiographical as literary critics say, you have to feel sorry for all that were involved in the real life events. Dick and Nicole are really caricatures of the Americans of their generation that lived the high life in Europe, and yet could never quite put their finger on what is was that they were actually meant to be doing.
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Summary: Ahhhh, The Master, Fitzgerald!
Review: Many people consider The great Gatsby to be Fitzgerald's greatest work. In doing this they are shortchanging him from all his other novels, and his short stories (which are also gems of craftsmanship). Tender is the Night is a mature work of Fitzgerald and therefore may not be as readily acceptable to the masses as The Great Gatsby. In addition, the vocabulary in Tender is the Night is decidedly complicated and slowgoing. However if you are patient, and have a good dictionary, you will be awarded by a beautiful plot in a matchless setting, that takes you to a time that has long past. Enjoy!!!!
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Summary: afternoons on the riviera
Review: I think of Fitzgerald's three (finished)novels this one is third best. And yet everyone who reads Tender is the Night is captivated by it. Everyone who reads it perhaps also knows they have to forgive this book a lot of its flaws. I think it is an easy book to criticize but what is good about it is really good and in fact hard to find anywhere else because it exists nowhere else and that is Fitgerald talking about love and by many accounts it is his own love life he is talking about. If Byron had left a book behind of his most famous love affair we would probably read that more than his poems. Fitzgerald wrote such a good book with Gatsby that anything that followed it would be a dissappointment. To critics it was a dissapointment but readers like it. This book does not so much ask for a reasoned response because there is so much that is unreasonable in it, what it asks for is for you to listen as one asks you to listen to a secret and in this case the secret is a romantic one by our best known romantic author. Tender is the Night with that romantic poets quote wears its heart on its sleeve but no one cares, thats why we read it. By the way the locations are great. Switzerland and the riviera. And the women are all sexy. Nicole and Rosemary. So don't be such a snob and enjoy this middleweight effort for the romantic and in the end sad music it makes. Everyones doing it. Note:Best read in the sun.
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Summary: Another monument to the Lost Generation
Review: Fitzgerald's fiction about the rich is written from the vantage point of one who is romantically, maybe neurotically, obsessed with them and articulates it so well. His writing, pulsating with the restless and reckless rhythms of the Jazz Age, finds its strength in empathy, its uncanny ability to describe emotions with clever, original metaphors. You find yourself pitying the problems of these perfectly created characters, but you'd still like to be one of them. "Tender is the Night" turns our attention to several American expatriates who live, work, and play in the French Riviera and various fashionable locations around Europe in the 1920's. At the center of the novel are an affluent young couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, whose marriage has been built on a shaky foundation. Dick is a prominent psychiatrist of modest means who met Nicole when she was a patient under his care in a Swiss sanitarium. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Nicole is still dangerously capricious and fragile. She is the daughter of a fabulously wealthy American man with a dirty secret, and she has a frigid, highly protective older sister called Baby who attempts to be the stabilizing factor in the Divers' lives. Dick and Nicole have two children whose infrequent mention is indicative of their relatively low level of love for them. One day on the beach at the Riviera, a young American movie actress named Rosemary Hoyt almost literally swims into the Divers' lives and quickly falls in love with Dick. Her mother encourages the affair, thinking Rosemary needs such risque life experiences to stimulate her passion. Nicole also has an extramarital affair with a magnetic playboy named Tommy Barban. By the end of the book, it is disheartening to see that Dick has to pay the price for both of their infidelities and Nicole, although "cured" to the point that she no longer needs his help, is still spoiled and frivolous. (That the rich can render themselves impervious to misfortunes and go on with their carefree lives, leaving the less fortunate to pick up the pieces, was also a major theme in "The Great Gatsby.") The scenes play out against a picturesque European backdrop populated by a host of interesting characters, including the flighty Abe and Mary North, the awkward McKiscos, the haughty Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, who gets her comeuppance most satisfactorily, and Collis Clay, a likeable collegiate fellow who hangs around Rosemary and seems to have wandered way outside his cultural element. This novel, the last Fitzgerald completed, reinforces his position as perhaps the greatest American prose stylist. His writing is like literary ambrosia; it bathes the tired, gray world in vibrant color and leaves it basking in a rosy hue. The experience of reading it is similar to that of listening to the most brilliant, sublime music ever composed or eating the most delicious food ever prepared -- something to be savored once in a long while if only to remind ourselves how good things can be.
Rating: 
Summary: Second-Rate Fitzgerald
Review: Though valuable to those interested in Fitzgerald, or to those who would find the historical and cultural aspects of the book interesting (the decadence of US ex-pat society life in 1920's southern Europe), compared to The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night was disappointing. Though the prose and literary style for which Fitzgerald is known is evident (and admittedly enjoyable), the book's plot is disappointingly weak and as shallowly developed as the lives of its protagonists. Though some might argue this is intentional, for one who's looking for a read to provide them with more mind-churning fodder on which to feast, this would not be the book in which to find it.
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Summary: This book is a must!
Review: I can only tell you that I have been reading books my entire life and this is the only one that made me cry. It is simply amazing!!! This is what fine literature is all about!!
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Summary: A tender look at a crumbling romance
Review: I read Tender is the Night soon after completing a somewhat haphazard survey of a selection of Fitzgerald's earlier stories and novels. The first thing that struck me about that book was the sophistication and maturity of the storytelling. The gossamer thin plot neither unfolds nor plods. Rather, it drifts through the life of Dick and Nicole Diver spanning five years. If I do have a criticism of the book it's that there is so little plot. It has elements of a romance, of a mystery, and of a tragedy, but defies most of the essential characteristics of each. The reader is instead left with a rich yet curiously oblique portrait of a couple falling out of love. Ironically, that's also the book's saving grace. Where traditional plot lines tend to dramatize with thick, clear lines, Fitzgerald's light and poetic prose paints with a more refined brush. You get to see Dick's decline with the same sad pity as his wife, and in the end are left with a better understanding of his downfall. More of a psychological study than a true drama, it's not a book that will leave you caring about the characters or wrapped up in the action.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent summer read
Review: For those of you who are Fitzgerald fans, this is a book that captures an individual's inner struggles and demons. Fitzgerald is always adept at identifying the weaknesses and aches of even the most 'powerful' or 'together' person. A book of substance and easy to read.
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