Tender is the Night: Can we like a novel about characters we loathe?

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" has some absolutely beautiful writing, the descriptive passages (ride in the funicular up the mountainside on the Riviera), amazingly astute descriptions of people and how their faces and eyes express vast ranges of emotion, sharp and elliptical dialogue that surely is the predecessor of Pinter, Mamet, even Stoppard - and yet, and yet - is it really such a great novel? Maybe so, I'll hold off on my judgment as I'm only about 1/3 through on this re-read, but it's not as appealing a novel as The Great Gatsby because there's no window, no distance, between us and the people who are basically selfish, foolish, and ruinous. In TGG, we see the world of Gatsby through the narrative lens of Nick C., which helps us understand and judge, and also helps us to see that Fitzgerald himself bears a distance from his characters, but in Tender is the Night there is no one between us and them - Fitzgerald uses third person, and it's obvious that his narrator, Dick Diver, is very much an alter ego, and it's hard not to dislike Diver - ridiculous handsome and attractive to women, smart, rich, but in the grand sense stupid and worthless: breaks all sorts of medical ethics as he begins a relationship with a patient (a relationship he encouraged when she was quite young by entertaining from her a series of flirtatious letters), mindlessly idling away on the beach while lamenting (a little) his lost talents, apparently great but not evident to us. And then the young starlet, Rosemary, falls for him instantly, even though (perhaps because?) she knows he's married with kids - and what will he do with her? The children are a total afterthought, by the way. So reading TITN, the question is: can we like a novel about characters we loathe, and perhaps are meant to loathe?