In the Library
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 61
- Length
- Length 108k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
This edition is still in copyright in the United States, so it cannot be bought there.
The first button opens the book in the app when it is installed; the badge gets the app.
Still in copyright in the United States: this edition is sold and read outside it.
To be included in Dick Diver's world for a while was a remarkable experience.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's other great study of a self-invented man ruined by the person he loved, though here the ruin takes years instead of a single summer.
£1.99
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
Another marriage collapses across fractured, out-of-order chapters narrated by someone who only understands the wreck in hindsight, much as Fitzgerald structures Dick's decline.
£1.99
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's cool, exacting prose watches a marriage starve on its own romantic illusions the way Fitzgerald watches Dick's devotion consume him from the inside.
£1.99
About the book
Watch how carefully Dick Diver stages an afternoon on the beach at Antibes: who sits where, who needs the joke told first, who must never see how much the sun and the shade are being managed for her. Nicole was his patient before she was his wife, a schizophrenic girl broken at fifteen by her own father, and Dick spent the best of himself curing her, the way a man might spend a fire warming a house he will never live in again. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote what he had watched happen to his own marriage to Zelda, and it shows: no other novel understands so exactly how a person can be consumed, kindness by kindness, by someone else's recovery. Nicole grows strong on what she takes from him, while Dick, drained past replenishing, drifts smaller across the map of America until the towns lose count of which one he is practicing in, a brilliant man erased by his own devotion. The ache of that vanishing, quiet, ordinary, almost administrative, is the truest thing this book knows.