Some thoughts on the difficulties of Tender Is the Night

Many years since I first read it, last night started re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" - saw a note in the intro - which I haven't read (I never read them till I finish the book) that Fitzgerald was disappointed that Tender was not such a huge success, at least in its time. Not that I don't understand and sympathize with an author's feelings about the world's response to his or her work, but re-opening Tender you quickly realize why it took a long time for the world to recognize and accept this novel. It's not nearly as immediately appealing and engaging as Gatsby or for that matter This Side of Paradise: for one thing, the third-person narrator is always a little more daunting; despite the difficulty and unseemliness of some of the material in Gatsby, we enter that world through the eyes and sensibility of Nick, the outsider and innocent looking on as people wreck their lives all around him. Tender Is the Night is in 3rd person, and we don't immediately identify with or even care for Dick Diver, "Lucky Dick" as they oddly call him - he seems at first one of those privileged characters who has it all, and though we know much worse is coming to him, we don't enter right away into his mind or point of view. Also, Fitzgerald uses a few challenging narrative techniques in first few chapters - a very compressed bio in the first chapter, as a shorthand way to give Dick's back story, and the second composed largely of letters from Nicole Warren to Dick, a shorthand, though very effective, way to introduce her character. Third chapter is the first to be more conventional as a novel, but I for one was startled by the frankness and directness with which F. introduced the incest theme, a topic often worked around or avoided in fiction of that era. The startling confession - Nicole's father had an incestuous relation with her - is what truly gets the novel started - but in its day it may also have put off many readers.