F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Almost Great Novel
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, is generally considered a literary masterpiece, and for good reason. Fitzgerald’s prose is beyond extraordinary, and at least in the case of Gatsby his storytelling is simple, satisfying, and poetic.
However, in the same way that Fitzgerald is remembered as a deeply flawed human being, his final novel, Tender Is The Night, shows a deep imbalance of skills, an imbalance that in some ways reflects the man himself. Tender Is The Night is a psychological character-drama, composed of outrageously beautiful prose, but which, sadly, fails to live up to its own narrative.
Tender Is The Night is the last novel that Fitzgerald completed before his early death at age 44. It is of course no coincidence that he died of alcohol-related causes and that alcoholism factors so heavily in Tender’s narrative. Much of the story was informed by the author’s actual life, to the point that some consider it to be part autobiography.
The apparent inspiration for the story came about when Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was institutionalized for schizophrenia in the early 1930’s, and much of Tender’s story revolves around the psychological treatment of the lead female character Nicole Diver, as well as the convoluted role that her husband Dick plays in this treatment.
In this way we see perhaps the most tragically real root of the story: that Dick starts out as his wife’s psychological caretaker, but in the end he is the one who falls apart completely.
Fitzgerald’s prose in this novel is exceptionally moving; it is both beautiful and poetic, yet spare and direct. Unlike many other great writers who structure their prose sentence-by-sentence, Fitzgerald goes by the paragraph, creating a full picture by building smaller, simpler sentences on top of each other.
Because of this his prose feels effortless and fluid, while also being clear and concise. Here is an example from page one of Tender:
“Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.”
This deceptively simple poetry in Fitzgerald’s prose is what makes him one of the quintessential American writers, and one of the best of his own era or any other. However, Fitzgerald could not always match his storytelling to that same incredible level of prose, and Tender provides a perfect case study of this imbalance of skills.
Throughout parts one and two of this novel the reader is lured into a complex character drama between ex-patriot socialites in a glamorous, jazz-age Europe. As time goes on we learn that everyone has their own secrets and their own dark side, and that our two protagonists, Dick and Nicole Diver, share a sordid history with some rather disturbing details.
We learn how explosive these secrets really are when the Diver’s close friend, Tommy Barban, challenges another man to a duel to protect the Diver’s from gossip.
Through parts one and two the twisted past is revealed slowly and subtly, emotional and psychological tension grows, and it seems as though these characters are headed towards some unspeakable catastrophe.
But once we reach part three the story begins to unravel. The tension stagnates, the characters drift through scenes without being challenged, and even some events that ought to be momentous turn out anticlimactic and unresolved.
When Dick discovers that his wife Nicole has a lover—and that it’s Tommy Barban, the same man who dueled in the beginning of the story—it seems as though we are setting up for a deadly serious showdown, one in which Dick will have to confront the fact that he was also unfaithful to Nicole, and where an honest reckoning says that he may deserve to lose... but the novel doesn’t follow through on any of this.
The showdown is a rather calm conversation at a café, and the resolution is that our main character spends the rest of his life drunk and alone. Sadly, this seems to be the author’s own life dictating the story rather than the story existing on its own terms.
Fitzgerald spent ten years working on this novel, drawing much of the inspiration from his own life, which leads one to think that the major reason he failed to construct a satisfying narrative is because the story too closely mirrored his reality.
To quote a literary critic of Fitzgerald’s own era, Malcolm Cowley, “ ’Tender is the Night’ is a good novel that puzzles you and ends by making you a little angry because it isn’t a great novel also. It doesn’t give the feeling of being complete in itself.” (Full Article Here)
Taken scene-for-scene, paragraph-by-paragraph, Tender shows every sign of being a truly great novel. But the story never culminates in a climax, the tension never breaks, and the narrative seems almost intentionally unsatisfying, which leaves the reader feeling confused and overall disappointed. Despite Fitzgerald’s transcendent prose, Tender Is The Night’s story falls apart in its most essential moments.
P.S. I wasn’t sure where to put this, but I do need to mention one startlingly racist and out-of-place line in the novel (at the very end of Part 1), wherein Dick Diver completely dismisses the death of black man, using the n-word to do so.
It’s so aggressive and out-of-the-blue, I don’t think it can be shrugged off as just ‘how people talked back then’. I have seen the argument online that this line is supposed to show us another flaw of Dick’s character, that he is racist, and his comment is not a reflection of the author’s real-life attitudes.
I would like to think this is the case, and it helps that Great Gatsby makes some positive comments about racial equality. But of course it’s impossible to know now what the author’s intent was, so make of it what you will.
Anyway, what do you think? Have you read this book? Did you like it? Did the ending make you as angry as it made me? Let me know in the comments!
Peace,
Nosbig
