Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
446 pages · Published 1933
Added to collection 2 weeks ago
“It was a fine blue day and the sun shone on the sea and the Riviera was like a bright prayer.”
Dick Diver is a brilliant young psychiatrist. His wife Nicole is beautiful, wealthy, and damaged. Together they preside over a circle of expatriates on the Riviera, throwing parties where the champagne flows and nobody mentions the cracks forming underneath. Fitzgerald wrote this novel from the wreckage of his own marriage and his own decline, and it shows — there is an intimacy to the destruction that fiction usually avoids. The Riviera sections gleam with borrowed sunlight: the beach at Cap d'Antibes, the evenings that start with cocktails and end with something broken. This is Fitzgerald's most personal novel, and his most painful. The beautiful surface conceals a book about watching talent and love dissolve in alcohol and wealth.
