Novel: Tender Is the Night

Overview
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night follows glamorous American expatriates drifting through Europe between the wars, tracing the rise and unraveling of Dick and Nicole Diver, a couple whose poise and beauty mask dependence, illness, and moral erosion. The novel opens on the French Riviera, where their magnetic presence gathers a floating world of friends, lovers, and hangers-on, and gradually peels back to reveal the fraught origins of their marriage and the corrosions of privilege, desire, and time.

Plot
On a sunstruck beach on the Riviera, teenage Hollywood star Rosemary Hoyt meets the Divers and becomes infatuated with Dick, a brilliant, charming psychiatrist. Seen first through Rosemary’s starry gaze, the Divers appear charmed, hosting lunches and parties, choreographing a fragile harmony among their circle. Cracks show quickly: Dick’s flirtation with Rosemary, Nicole’s sudden mood swings, and the brittle gaiety of their friends suggest a delicate order under strain. Rosemary and Dick grow close in Paris, the attraction intensifying as the group’s festivities shade into quarrels, jealousies, and moments of violence and shame. The Divers’ poise is revealed as a performance that costs them dearly to sustain.

A long flashback rewinds to Dick’s early career in Zurich. A rising light in psychiatry, he meets Nicole Warren, a wealthy American adolescent hospitalized after a breakdown rooted in incest by her father. Nicole, writing to him with alternating dependency and defiance, becomes his patient, then his wife. Marriage entangles Dick’s professional identity with Nicole’s recovery and the immense Warren fortune. The money opens Europe’s doors and helps fund Dick’s ambitions for a clinic, but it also shifts the balance of power; he becomes curator of their social world and guardian of Nicole’s stability, roles that gradually erode his vocation and sense of self.

As years pass, Nicole improves and Dick deteriorates. His drinking intensifies; his pride and judgment fray. A humiliating incident with the police in Rome and quarrels with colleagues make his decline visible. The Divers retreat to the Riviera, where their glitter persists, but order can no longer be kept. Nicole gains confidence and agency; Dick grows irritable, unreliable, and haunted by the feeling that life’s decisive moment has slipped past. Tommy Barban, a forthright soldier-adventurer and long-time friend, becomes Nicole’s lover and then her choice for a different future. Nicole divorces Dick and marries Tommy, while Dick drifts back to America, practicing medicine in small towns and receding into anonymity, a brilliant promise spent.

Themes and Motifs
The novel entwines love, caretaking, and power. Dick’s profession positions him as Nicole’s healer, then binds him to her wealth and illness; their intimacy is charged by gratitude, guilt, and control. Expatriate glamour functions as a narcotic and a stage set, both shelter and trap, mirroring the Jazz Age’s bright surfaces over postwar disillusionment. Money confers freedom yet demands allegiance, undermining vocation and character. Time, so central to Fitzgerald’s work, presses relentlessly: youth’s golden poise tilts into middle age, and the capacities that once defined a self prove exhaustible. Against these forces, the sea-and-sun imagery of the Riviera and the soft European nights render beauty as both blessing and anesthetic.

Structure and Style
The 1934 text proceeds nonlinearly, beginning with Rosemary’s enchanted perspective before revealing the Zurich backstory, so that admiration shades into comprehension and then sorrow. Fitzgerald’s lyrical, shimmering prose catches the seductions of wealth and the ache of decline, shifting focalization among characters to chart both Nicole’s recovery and Dick’s drift. The result is a portrait of brilliance consumed by its own obligations, and of a marriage whose founding wound becomes, paradoxically, the means of one partner’s healing and the other’s fall.