Tender Is the Night – And Hard It Is To Read
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
It’s difficult to explain in words how awestruck I was as a literature undergrad when I read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – not because of the plot, but because of the way he spun some sentences with an effortless, effervescent charm. Unfortunately, not even the slightest sliver of that literary magic was to be seen in “Tender Is the Night”. So, it took me almost 3 months to finish reading the novel, which if it were interesting, shouldn’t have taken me more than 3 weeks, and that is if I were hard-pressed for time, and not more than three days otherwise. Sigh.
I’ve been dreading write this review, just as much as I dreaded picking up “Tender is the Night” over the many weeks it took me to come to its end. The novel starts from the point-of-view of 18-year-old actress Rosemary Hoyt, who is holidaying at the French Riviera with her mother and falls in love at first sight with an older handsome man she spots on the beach. The fact that he is already married, doesn’t deter the young actor from pursuing a dalliance. We learn the man is Dick Diver, a 34-year-old psychiatrist, who is married to Nicole Diver and has two kids with her. Despite his marital status, Rosemary and Dick start an affair and through flashbacks we learn about Dick’s turbulent life with Nicole, and the source of all his problems is Dick himself. Yep, Dick is a Dick.
The flashbacks also reveal that Nicole was originally a patient at the facility where Dick works. So… let’s just say, if a psychiatrist like Dick Diver existed today, he wouldn’t just be ‘cancelled’, he could even face some potential jail time. This tale hasn’t aged well at all, is problematic in its themes, over-romantic in certain other areas, and is just an unreadable mess. But given how good Scott’s writing style is, I kept reading, hoping for the story to get better at some point, and honestly, somewhere in the second half, it does offer some tragically interesting backstory to why Nicole was in a mental health institution at a very tender age, but it only makes the overarching tale seem even more problematic.
If you’re a little confused about whether you should be reading Tender Is the Night, just ask yourself if you’re okay with a male protagonist who takes advantage of a mentally ill patient, marries her, then blatantly cheats on her with a younger woman, all in the name of romance or escape. Of course, the tale isn’t that simple. Dick dives into a hellish hole he creates for himself by marrying someone he knew wasn’t mentally stable, leading to lots of problems in the union. And while the author doesn’t explicitly state that Dick might have married Nicole not just for her beauty but also for the great wealth she comes with, you can’t help but be suspicious that the money could’ve been a great motivator too. He is hardly ever working in the novel, and is mostly just hosting parties and chilling by the beach, which has to be on his wife’s money. So yeah, Dick is definitely a dick. That’s my biggest takeaway from this novel.
Rating: 1 on 5 stars.
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