Another one from my too large TBR pile – Tender is the night
Tender is the night – the blurb
Set in the south of France in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic tale of a young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and her complicated relationship with the alluring American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth pushed him into a glamorous lifestyle, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s decline.
Dick v Jay
I’m not sure I agree with the blurb describing the book as all about ‘tragic Rosemary’. Whilst Rosemary kicks things off, there is very little of her in the latter half of the book that becomes all about Dick’s decline and the decline of his marriage. One immediately looks for parallels between Dr Diver and Mr Gatsby and they are certainly there. But as the glamour of the Diver’s lifestyle is unwrapped the parallels between Dr Diver and Fitzgerald himself are all too clear. Alcoholism and mental health feature heavily as well as childhood trauma which I wasn’t really expecting amongst a back drop of Hollywood, social circles and day tripping around the South of France.
It’s quite lengthy (around 400 pages), slow and I’m still not sure I have grasped what exactly is tender in the night but I didn’t not enjoy it and I didn’t skip through pages just to get to the end. Make of that what you will.