Spoiler warning: This article contains details from the plot of Tender is the Night.
If there were ever a character born from summer, it would be Rosemary Hoyt, a young Hollywood starlet. It is with her naïve perspective that F. Scott Fitzgerald crafts the divinely summer-soaked Tender is the Night. Lured by such sweet descriptions of warm beach days, I return to the novel every year, but it is the heart of the story — the downfall of Dick and Nicole Diver — which keeps me reading.
Divided into three parts, the novel begins by following Rosemary on the French Riviera. Immediately upon encountering the Divers at the beach, she is enraptured with the pair and madly in love with Dick. The Divers pull her into their universe, in which it seems that money is no object, friends are faintly famous and deeply flawed and the primary objective of life is pleasure.
It is due to Rosemary’s gaze that I find the novel so mesmerizing. Her obsession with the Divers, and Dick in particular, leads her to present their world with the golden murkiness of someone who has bought completely into a dream. When cracks inevitably appear in its facade, they’re easily painted over by trusting the glamour of it all. By following Rosemary’s perspective, Fitzgerald lets us believe in the illusion as she presents it. Then, he tears it apart.
Parts two and three of the novel take us back to Dick’s past, when he first met Nicole. It is with one revelation that the illusion of the Divers is shattered: Dick was a practicing psychiatrist and Nicole his schizophrenic patient. Thus, the world Rosemary glimpsed was precarious, a fragile act meant to conceal their history, one which at times spiraled into exclusively the relationship of doctor and patient.
From this point on, Tender is the Night follows the ruin of the Divers’ relationships, and most especially of Dick Diver himself. He abuses alcohol and grows increasingly rash, and one by one the side characters of that initial summer are lost to them through death or argument. Perhaps the most important loss is Rosemary. Upon their final meeting, Dick finds that she has matured into a girl who no longer places him on such a high pedestal, so he pushes her away along with the rest. Nicole, aware of his love for the younger actress, falls into another man’s arms, and Dick is ultimately left alone. Their wealth was always Nicole’s, and in the end he finds himself practicing psychiatry unsuccessfully in the Finger Lakes.
Tender is the Night captures the gold-coated appeal of the wealthy as a romantic might be inclined to see it. It is a take on a world which, so long as you stay in the shallows, is giddily charming and unfathomably prosperous — yet conceals unforgivable wrongs in its depths. Tender is the Night drags its reader through countless twists with characters whose lives never end up quite where you’d expect, uncovering the sinister beneath the beautiful. Most prominently, the book is about the fall of Dick Diver, a man whose authority seemed infallible, but which slowly slips from his fingers until he is left with nothing.
It would be difficult to recommend this book outright, as Fitzgerald is an author with highly visible prejudice against any race, sexuality or gender which does not match his own. The novel’s appalling treatment of a Black man’s murder is perhaps the clearest example, and misogyny is rampant throughout. Such instances highlight the limited privileges and prevalent hatred in the society Fitzgerald is portraying, furthering the picture of its severe flaws, though I am doubtful that this was his intention.
I believe the novel is worth reading for those who enjoy slow-paced, character-driven narratives. Each of the Divers’ acquaintances are complicated and often problematic, resulting in a fascinating story of lives which are, for most of us, entirely unrelatable. It weaves between crises, glamor and betrayal, building magnetic characters whose decaying relationships feel only deserved. I expect at this time next year, when the weather is frigid and summer is at its most appealing, I’ll be reading Tender is the Night again.
Rye Blizzard is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a contributor for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at rab538@cornell.edu.
