What everyone remembers about Tender is the Night : the crack-up

After banging on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" for a few days now, let me note for the record here that this novel actually gets quite a bit better - more moving, more thoughtful - in the 4th (?) section, The Escape, as Dick Diver joins with old pal Franz to set up a psychiatric clinic in Zurich. At last, for the first time in the novel, we see Diver do something useful in his life and actually justify the repeated assertions that he's a great and famous doctor - now we see him with patients, and we get a sense of what life was like in a Swiss sanatorium in 1925 or so - comparisons with The Magic Mountain are obvious and appropriate, and in the hospital in Tender is the Night we see much more hopelessness and despair, and we get a better sense of the frustrations of the doctors, working in the early years of psychoanalysis. This really should have been Fitzgerald's subject through the whole novel, in my view, and if he felt it was necessary to build all this up through the long sections of what he describes as the leisure class at the height of its wit - I would say at the depths, personally - I think he was wrong. What all of us remember of Tender is the Night is Nicole's mental illness and crack-up and how Diver does or does not help her - with the obvious poignant and painful autobiographical elements. This element of the story really doesn't take shape at all till the Escape section - Nicole's mental instability described in first section but then more or less ignored for 150 pages or so as we follow Dick and his flirtations and insecurities. In the Zurich section we see Nicole have a true almost homicidal/suicidal breakdown, and we begin to comprehend the gravity of the family situation. Interesting, the children begin to emerge as actual characters in this section as well. The novel is at last on track.