Dick Diver gets just what he deserved, in Tender is the Night

Ultimately, I was a little surprised - I'd remembered, from first reading quite a few years ago, that F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" was primarily about Nicole's mental breakdown - but I think in memory I must have superimposed too much information about Zelda Fitzgerald and her well-known hospitalizations; in fact, in Tender is the Night, Nicole has very few - maybe only one significant - episodes of mental instability, but the novel begins with her in a psychiatric hospital, where Diver breaks all appropriate boundaries and falls in love with her, marries her. Her instability is tragic for her in that it lets Diver control her throughout the course of their marriage: she's frail, sickly, has to be watched over all the time, and he's the one who cured her, the brilliant psychiatrist, etc. In the last section, devoted to Nicole's point of view, we see that ultimately she is by far the stronger. She comes to see what (most) readers (today) would have seen long ago - that Diver is an egotistical, lazy, alcoholic bully who is essentially living off her family money. As he ages, and as he removes himself ever farther from his profession, this becomes obvious to anyone - he fights with friends, is crude in social settings, bumblingly flirtatious with the actress, Rosemary (he was charming when she was a kid, but now that she's matured he seems, at least to us, like a dolt), finally he's totally foolish when trying to perform water acrobatics far beyond his ability. Ultimately, Nicole throws him over as she starts an affair - and later marries - one of their old cohort, Tommy. He's probably no prize either, and in some circumstances we might blame Nicole for her infidelity, but not here. Good riddance, Dick Diver! In a very odd last chapter we learn that Diver moved back to the U.S. and had a medical practice in upstate New York in a series of ever-smaller communities - Buffalo, Lockport, Geneva, can't remember the last but it was some tiny N.Y. village. What to make of this? Our last image of him is of an anonymous fade into the smallest of small-town American life - as if, for Fitzgerald, that is a tragedy greater than none other? Or is the tragedy really Nicole's? This novel may have been more effective in an earlier time, when people were truly interested, or fooled by, the glamor of the Riviera and the expatriate American life, but I think readers today will have no patience with or sympathy for Diver's behavior and personality and will not feel that the conclusion is tragic at all, just inevitable, just what he deserved.