By F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

He does an interesting job of portraying that era but he is so wordy. I could say in a few words what it takes him a whole
paragraph to express. You have to go back to try to figure out what is his intent. I guess people are impressed by that but
I find it irritating.
You just asked me if I had anything else to add -- no, I'm a person of few words (see above)

I know it might sound petty, but I actually really didn't like the original blue/white busy front cover that was posted prior to the one with the female on the front, so I waited until I found a new one or until that one changed. After seeing the pictured new cover I decided to go ahead and buy it but the book I received in the mail was the old design.

FITZGERALD writes about a young man's youth and struggle to find himself and what his generation stand for. A well written book that is perfect for someone that likes poetry or just looking for an interesting, somewhat short, novel about finding who you are.

For some reason my book was bent up and looks like someone tried to rip it (on the spine... it's a thin book so it was torn down the middle over an inch) I need it for class now so I won't be returning it but sadly I won't be able to display this in my personal library because it is damaged and looks pretty awful. The box it came in was untouched, not ripped or broken at all. I don't understand what could have happened to my book. The pages are torn throughout the book.

The pictures painted by Fitzgerald 's metaphors were satisfying. It was hard to like the main character...arrogance was his tragic flaw. The message regarding accepting one's self despite these flaws came through. Also liked when he equated beauty with weakness even though he was beautiful. Glad I read this.

Creating a longing for the 20s and intellectualism, Fitzgerald's novel produces a sort of nostalgia that the reader cannot even explain. Joining Amory on his journey to discover himself allows the reader to do the same. As a college student nearing graduation, Amory' s story and his struggles deeply resonates with me.

Very Fine novel by one of the great American writers of 20th century. Wonderfully crafted wriiting which flows beautifully. One of Scott Firgerald's 2 major works the other being the Great Gatsby which I preferred.

Very well written but that virtue does not overcome the fact that it's all about self-centered and entitled elitists, and immature ones at that, going to Princeton in the second decade of the 20th century. I wanted to read it because it was the first success of the guy who wrote "The Great Gatsby," which was indeed great, but I could not bring myself to care about these characters and did not finish the book. I might assign this book in an American literature or creative writing class so students could compare an early work to the same author's more mature one, but I would never recommend it to be read for pleasure.

Had never read Fitzgerald before--found the book a little boring--having seen The Great Gatsby(movie) I expected more !
Knowing about the author's rocky life makes me want to read more of what he wrote--will look forward to his other writings

It is a very contemplative look at the life of youth in early 20th century America, however the struggles that Amory contends with throughout can easily be applied to life today...especially as Americans deal with a great financial recession and the longest war in American History.

"Thrift Edition" means low quality paper and tiny print with small spacing between the lines. If you have young eyes, maybe you don't care. But I do care about the typeface and spacing, as well as the way the paper feels in my hands as I turn the page. But for under $3, it's not worth returning. Just thought others should know.

"Thrift Edition" means low quality paper and tiny print with small spacing between the lines. If you have young eyes, maybe you don't care. But I do care about the typeface and spacing, as well as the way the paper feels in my hands as I turn the page. But for under $3, it's not worth returning. Just thought others should know.

This is the worst book I've ever read. It's inconceivable that his next book was The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald spends way too much time on late night bull sessions, but then skips over Amory's military service in World War I. Did anything happen to Amory while he was there? A great alternative to sleeping aids.

A college minor in English had not introduced me to this well-known author so I was anxious to give him a try. PERHAPS his better known works are more interesting, but the last 80 percent of this book went nowhere and I am disgusted with myself for wasting time finishing it. Totally unsatisfactory.

Read Fitzgerald in my young adult years and this was my favorite of his books. Just read it again (many decades later) and appreciated it just as much, if not more. I had forgotten how influential it was in forming my foundational views about the meaning of life and the purpose of living.

I only bought this book for its cover. I needed it for a craft I was working on and I paid more for shipping than the book, so Im not totally disapointed. However, I am disapointed that the image of the book is not what the book actually looks like since that was the only reason I purchased the book. If I knew what it looked like I would not have gotten it. The book was in good condition and if I were to read it was well worth it. It was just not right for my craft.

This is the worst book I've ever read. It's inconceivable that his next book was The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald spends way too much time on late night bull sessions, but then skips over Amory's military service in World War I. Did anything happen to Amory while he was there? A great alternative to sleeping aids.

A college minor in English had not introduced me to this well-known author so I was anxious to give him a try. PERHAPS his better known works are more interesting, but the last 80 percent of this book went nowhere and I am disgusted with myself for wasting time finishing it. Totally unsatisfactory.

Read Fitzgerald in my young adult years and this was my favorite of his books. Just read it again (many decades later) and appreciated it just as much, if not more. I had forgotten how influential it was in forming my foundational views about the meaning of life and the purpose of living.

I did not like the main character from the beginning of the book. He seemed self-centered and spoiled, and I considered not finishing the book, but kept hoping he would change and improve. He didn't. I haven't read any other books by this author, and now I probably won't read anymore, not even the Great Gatsby.

I only bought this book for its cover. I needed it for a craft I was working on and I paid more for shipping than the book, so Im not totally disapointed. However, I am disapointed that the image of the book is not what the book actually looks like since that was the only reason I purchased the book. If I knew what it looked like I would not have gotten it. The book was in good condition and if I were to read it was well worth it. It was just not right for my craft.

Two things about 'This Side of Paradise' will leave a lifelong impression on me. I've only just finished the novel, but I already know that its marks will remain embedded in me like luminescent sparks fallen from the starry skies of literature. The first thing impressed on me, Amory Blaine. Never have I connected with a protagonist more than I have with him. I know his thoughts and musings well, for many of his notions and ideals mirror my own. For good or ill. Amory is my favorite character in literature. The second thing impressed on me from the reading of this book is the way that it was written. Reading of the escapades of Amory was like reading a journal of his that was stuffed with hidden folded letters and notes, scraps of poetry and fiction and even sections of a play. I've never read a novel written like this, and I am extremely impressed that it was F. Scott Fitzgerald's first published work. This is a groundbreaking work.
As always, Fitzgerald's writing was lyrical, descriptive, flowery, and composed of such outstanding memorable prose as to be set apart and above the work of Fitzgerald's contemporaries. Ernest Hemingway will remain my favorite writer, but I can say with assurance that Fitzgerald's talent with words is much more pronounced, though not as true and gripping. Fitzgerald's prose, though phenomenal, has a way of wandering aimlessly in a charming way.
This was a novel I'd started reading at some point last fall, stopped, and only recently started again. I'm not sure why it took me so long, pausing to finish other novels by other writers. What I can say is that I read this novel in they way that Fitzgerald wrote it: in scraps and tatters, half-remembered fragments, until today, in a feverish pace, I read 'This Side of Paradise' from somewhere around its middle to its end. This book, now completed, was absolutely astonishing, a marvel. I can easily see how this novel was instrumental in ushering in the Jazz Age.
I recommend starting Fitzgerald's collection with 'Tales of the Jazz Age' and maybe 'The Great Gatsby', but 'This Side of Paradise' should certainly be coming up next on the reading list. Amory Blaine doesn't disappoint, and you'll never read another book like it.

Oh, Brother !!! This book is just about nothing else but incoherent wordy rants. Fitzgerald pulls a Conztanza even when pulling a Conztanza wasn't even invented yet !!!!.
The main character is an unlikable , unrelatable annoying young man who goes around life expecting everything by doing next to nothing.
The story (if any) is complicated with a bunch of philosophies that makes the reader unable to understand what the author meant. To be honest , i am not sure what i did just read ...i started skipped entire sections in hopes that it will get interesting ,but never did. It is a total mess .Probably someone from that era could had related to this story ...but as today in 2016 just not !.

Before the decade of the Twenties became known for its flappers with bobbed hair and a general freedom for America's youth, F. Scott Fitzgerald advertised those possibilities in his first novel, "This Side of Paradise."

Fitzgerald wrote parts of the novel while a student at Princeton, based on his own experiences. He was a mediocre student at the Ivy League institution, but obtained an education nevertheless by performing with a college theatre group called the Triangle Club and reading literature, much like Amory Blaine, the main character of the novel. Just before he enlisted in the army for the Great War, Fitzgerald tried to get a first draft of his novel published. After the Armistice was signed, Fitzgerald worked as an artist for an advertising firm before quitting, moving to Minnesota, and reworking the novel.

Mass consumerism and mass marketing developed after the Second Industrial Revolution in America. Businesses found that a catchy slogan and well-constructed advertising sold their products. As others caught on, advertising became required. A popular political cartoon of the day reflected the importance of advertising. In the cartoon, an inventor fell asleep outside the door of his out-of-the-way cottage. The reader realizes that building a better mousetrap doesn't guarantee that people will buy the new product, especially if they do not know about it.

Advertising firms hired artists like Amory Blaine to construct the advertisements for these products. Advertisements were featured in newspapers and weekly publications, who hired talented writers to compose short stories to entice the public to read their journals and thus, improve their viability to advertisers. Prices fell as the journals made their profits on selling advertisement. Fitzgerald's short time as an artist with an advertising firm, and his subsequent career as an artist of short stories were as much a fabric of the Twenties as the hedonism in the novel that most readers responded to.

Two of the love interests of Amory Blaine, Isabelle Borgé and Rosalind Connage, were based on real-life loves of Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was able to get the girl in real life that Amory Blaine could not. The fame generated by his first novel improved Fitzgerald's earnings potential and made him a viable suitor. Thomas Parke D'Invilliers and Monsignor Darcy were also based on friends of Fitzgerald. Amory's mother, Beatrice Blaine, was based on a mother of a friend.

Critics loved the novel, citing it as the only adequate study of the contemporary American adolescent and young adult. Universities condemned Amory Blaine's impression of college life as a country-club atmosphere of snobbery even though colleges, at the time, were primarily composed of students of well-to-do families from prestigious high-school academies. American adolescents and young adults experimented with the drinking and casual kissing outlined in the novel, creating a new sea of morals for the Roaring Twenties. The mass-produced automobile, available to more customers because of its low price, brought mobility into the life of people. Young lovers could get away from judgmental eyes, and they did.

Other notable authors produced stories on similar topics later in the decade. Sinclair Lewis wrote of a middle-aged George Babbitt catching the seven-year itch and going on a drunken spree of debauchery. Oil! of Upton Sinclair also explored the era's possibilities with Bunny Ross, the son of a wealthy oil mogul. These two heavy hitters of literature helped capture the spirit of The Roaring Twenties, but the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the era. This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby are required reading for anyone looking to explore the changing cultural fabric of American society in the Twenties.

Comparisons between Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby are inevitable. Both are viewed as his most complete artistic visions; and both are in the enviable position of being on the Modern Libraries list of the 100 best pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.

Gatsby is gorgeously written, and the language is expressive, nuanced, and multi-leveled. One can read and re-read Gatsby and find new things with each reading. A better definition of a classic I cannot find. Gatsby is also a radically economical novel. Coming in at just 50,000 words, it is nearly a novella. A short book, it seems long due to its reputation and genius. But in the end, it is petite, and Fitzgerald had to work within the confines of this short narrative structure.

Not so with Tender is the Night. At 108,000 words, the novel allows Fitzgerald to sprawl; in the course of the novel, we see far less compressed development of the characters than in Gatsby. There are far more graphic representations of scene, the flow of time, and the outcome of events. Tender shows the reader how good Fitzgerald could be in a longer form. He stretches his wings, and the results are astonishing. It is a moving and tragic novel of love and life gone astray.

Even with some of the novel's problems (does the text really give us enough of Nichole's insanity? Is Dick Diver's descent given enough grounding) Tender is the perfect accompaniment to Gatsby and Gatsby to Tender. For writers, it shows that if lighting does not exactly strike twice, similar results can be produced by and expressed by the same electric charge.

Tender is the Night describes the life and unraveling of a young doctor, Dick Diver, who lived in the 1930's in Paris. The book describes Dick's marriage to Nicole and Dick's love affair with Rosemary, a young actress. This novel is a touching story and a worthwhile read. However, it grapples with some very deep and complex themes, and therefore may leave the reader with more questions than answers.

Tender is the Night wrestles with the powers and limits of several different kinds of love - father, Healer, and Lover. I have written my review about these three kinds of love because I think these themes are central to the understanding of the novel.

For many women it is difficult to untangle between what they need from a man and what they still need from their daddy. Emotionally and psychologically, there can be a fair amount of overlap between the two roles. Physically, however, there is no overlap. Sex with a father is inappropriate and damaging. From the male's perspective, many men enjoy being the savior of the damsel in distress and find it empowering to become the daddy the girl never had. But again there comes a point when the man tires of being a savior/daddy figure and just wants to be a man who is loved for himself without it being predicated on his ability to save or heal. Many men try to give away too much of themselves, and then like Dick, they end up defeated and drained.

Tender is the Night deals with these complex relationships. The love between Dick Diver and Nicole is based on his ability to be her savior/healer. She is his life's work, Fitzgerald notes. The question posed by the book is, however, is this a healthy foundation for a marriage? It means Nicole has to remain sick to continue needing Dick, and he has to forbear on his dreams so he can concentrate on her needs only. How long can this last? The book seems to indicate that this cannot last long. Eventually, Dick tires of his role and becomes resentful of Nicole. Nicole, from her end, keeps her end of the bargain and her illness persists throughout the marriage. However, as soon as she decided to leave Dick and become her own healer, her illness improves. Did Dick and Nicole ever love each other? Maybe; it's an open question.

The theme continues with Rosemary who becomes famous by starring in a film called "Daddy's Girl." Rosemary too is looking for a daddy but for other reasons. She has not been abused by her father like Nicole but has never known her father. She adores Dick in a childish way and yearns to be sexually intimate with him for the wrong reasons; she just wants a daddy figure. Dick responded to her initially by being exactly what she needed him to be--a kind father figure who refused to be intimate with her. But then, just like with Nicole, he couldn't remain the heroic, idealized man for too long. Eventually, Dick gives in and becomes intimate with Rosemary. But Rosemary is disappointed; she liked him better when he was a daddy figure who stood on high moral ground. Was there ever any love between Rosemary and Dick? Again, it's an open question.

Who was Dick? Dick tried to be a hero and healer but eventually he couldn't keep up with the high standards he set for himself. He then began to unravel. He might have fared better had he set lower standards. Many commentators have noted that the events in this novel mirror the events in Fitzgerald's personal life. And this may explain why the Fitzgerald describes Dick Diver's descent into alcoholism without any sympathy. Fitzgerald was hard on his character (Dick Diver) because he was hard on himself - too hard. Dick Diver and men like him deserve sympathy. Dick Diver genuinely wanted to be the perfect man who healed all broken hearts and comforted all broken spirits. In the end, however, it was his heart and spirit that needed mending.

This is perhaps one of the best stories for a twenty-something year old to read during the recession, especially if they have had to set aside their dreams and currently search for something less than extraordinary in order to survive. It is amazing how relevant it is even so long after the emergence of the Jazz Age. Where the book was focused on the clash between old Victorian ideals and the emerging youth liberalization after the first World War, today we find ourselves just as lost. These wars that we've been fighting and this recession that we are suffering through will redefine our nation just as it was redefined after the conflict of WWI. The question is how?

Amory is caught in the very center of this clash between Victorian conservatism and youth liberalization. It is up to him and the other young men and women of the times to either create the new new, or stick with the old. I see the character of Amory Blaine in the face of all my college friends who had dreams of what their lives would be like after graduation, only to have those dreams dashed upon the rocks of this recession. Let us all pray that in the end we don't end up like Fitzgerald, who modeled his character Amory after himself. Let us hope that we don't follow in the path of Amory and are able to regain our aspirations when things improve, otherwise we might drown our hopelessness in bottles of alcohol until it kills us just like the famed U.S. author that wrote this book.

I remember my first experience reading it, back in 11th grade. It is not really the best book for high schoolers, but perhaps in that suburban milieu of doctors' kids and dissolving marriages, it was a good choice. Another reason I wanted to read it was that a Fitzgerald biography said this was pretty much FSF's take on his own, deeply troubled, marriage.

The book begins from the point of view of an innocent - Rosemary Hoyt, an American movie star (this was the 1920s) visiting some people on the Cote d'Azur, at a fictitious place on the shore between Cannes and St. Tropez. She quickly falls for an older man, an American doctor named Dick Diver who is married to a beautiful, and very rich, woman named Nicole. On the surface, everything is beautiful, glamorous, luxurious, and rich. But below there is trouble - quarrels, drunkenness, crazy behavior, homosexuality, and other ills. Rosemary doesn't see it though, and with the stubbornness of a beautiful, naïve girl, she goes after Dick. He resists, but begins to fall in love with her. There is a cast of supporting characters such as Abe North, a wacky drunk, and Tommy Barban, a hotheaded young Frenchman with a military career behind him. '

Rosemary is drawn in, as the reader is, and as the wealthy but mentally disturbed Nicole Warren was. Dick radiates calm, knowledge, success, strength, and joie de vivre. As the story turns to the Divers' marital history, the impressions alter, and the book becomes the tale of Dick's undoing. Diver was a young, hardworking, Yale educated doctor at a clinic in Switzerland. A young, but seriously troubled (probably schizophrenic, as Zelda Fitzgerald was, although this word is not used) gets the hots for him, and against everyone's advice, Dick marries her. She has a mindlessly arrogant rich girl sister, named Baby, who is portrayed superbly. Dick and Nicole have a couple of kids and some good times, but he is as much her medical caretaker as he is her husband, and it starts to wear him down. Things start unravelling. The whole book has a tragic, downward trajectory, a feeling of impending misery that no amount of sunlight and good wine and comfortable surroundings can dispel. '

The book is a downer, but it is a fascinating one, with moments of brilliant writing. Fitzgerald can string words together and juxtapose them with sparkle and casual elegance. The characters' conversations are real and believable, as are the depictions of gay people (ahead of its time, I should think) and the playful rich. It is a very good novel, and deserves to be remembered even if it is not the icon that The Great Gatsby is. No doubt there is some satisfaction in watching the Divers crumble, those people that had every advantage imaginable, but it is still a sad read, and the product of a great artist who was in a great deal of trouble.

As soon as I finished this book, I was ready to start all over and read it again. F. Scott Fitzgerald fills This Side of Paradise with his signature lyricism and beautiful phrasing, and combines it here with autobiographical elements and deep introspection. I love the maturity and wisdom with which Fitzgerald reflects on his own life through the story of Amory Blaine, and how it follows Blaine in times of extreme good and bad fortune, making it much more relatable than a standard tale that follows a hero's journey. I feel it is very descriptive and indicative of the time at which it was written, and I appreciate the way you can pick up on the overall feeling of the time without that explanation even being the focus of the story, which I believe is a nod to Fitzgerald's skill. Overall, I would highly recommend reading this book, ideally multiple times, so you can be sure to pick up on each layer of meaning and the motivation and thought behind each word. The story is one of much more than it might initially appear, and it goes much beyond just the life of Amory Blaine, delving into the pitfalls and feelings of the time period and of growing up in general. Readers can certainly draw parallels from this novel, relate them to their own lives, and even learn a little about how to approach their lives. I certainly did.

The first 40 pages is dull. So is the middle 100 pages. The ending is probably one of the most unsatisfying endings I've ever read as it ends not with not a bang but a sad whimper in diminuendo as if the author just didn't want to work on it anymore and dashed off a coda.

Fitzgerald's lyricism, in my opinion, is simply overrated. Granted, there are some breathtaking passages (which I took note of), but most of the writing was just dull, dull, dull. He would've benefited tremendously from studying storytelling as well since he makes the middle portion so deadly dull that it made me want to chuck it across the room, and butchers the last portion so badly that it came across as amateurish - choppy, rushed, and consequently ungraceful - which gives credence to his own remark about the book: "I would give anything if I hadn't had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant..."

He also makes tons of basic storytelling faux pas, such as redundant attributions (e.g. "I think so, too," he agreed), unnecessary and dull passages that add practically nothing to the story, a whole section (the middle section, more specifically from p.114 to 207) where we follow the main characters wander around without any specific objective except to kill time, and the last part that's haphazardly and painfully put together. The result is a very uneven book with deep pits of absolute boredom.

Didn't really like it

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second-highest regarded novel reveals the psyche of its tortured author. As a reading experience, it draws interest from the character of that author, equal parts eloquence and self-loathing. But it lacks the easy engagement and storycraft of Fitzgerald's other fiction.

Published in 1934, nine years after Fitzgerald's prior novel "The Great Gatsby" (and the only other novel after "Gatsby" Fitzgerald lived to complete), "Tender Is The Night" centers around a young, handsome couple who live as wealthy American expatriates on France's Mediterranean coast. Dick Diver is practical but somewhat frustrated, a situation exacerbated by the arrival of ingénue film actress Rosemary Hoyt. Encouraged by her mother, Rosemary takes a fancy to Dick and decides to lose her virginity to him. Dick's wife Nicole senses something is brewing, but her husband's fidelity is far from the only issue on her very full plate.

Two psychoanalytic profiles dominate this book. The first, of Nicole Diver, is shallow and unconvincing. The other, of the author himself, is far more engaging, if more a matter of connecting the dots between Fitzgerald and Dick than what the text itself affords. Dick, we come to learn, is a man of great potential, a leader in his chosen field who chooses to exile himself at the height of his success. As the book goes on, Dick descends deeper into alcohol and social-outcast status. While his profession is psychoanalysis, he is often found late in the novel working on a giant manuscript he never seems able to finish. The Fitzgerald parallels are obvious and will fascinate admirers.

But the novel feels thin at its core. I don't think I could put it any better than the title of Michael G.'s review from July 2011 - "Slender Is The Plot." Divided in three sections, each primarily seen through the lens of a different person - first Rosemary, then Dick, then Nicole - "Tender" is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about the continent, with people giving random voice to their concerns in the Age of Anxiety in-between squabbles and trysts. The characters seem more like narrative constructs than real people. Dick, for example, goes from solid citizen in the early and middle section (a large part of which is a flashback to an earlier period in his life) to dangerous drunk for no better reason it seems than a girl he pines for. Jimmy Buffett knew better than to lean on that excuse too hard, but it forms the spine of our story.

Fitzgerald seems more self-indulgent here, both in his writing (a lot of description gets troweled upon incidents of little or no importance to the larger story, like a visit to a World War I battlefield or the drunken antics of a doomed friend) and in what he writes about, with Dick reduced on account of allowing himself to be used by both his wife and his would-be mistress. It's not his fault he's so damn sexy! The drinking issue comes up as an afterthought, as if Fitzgerald felt lost without employing his trademark malady. But Dick's issues, like Nicole's, never seem very real. Neither, at their heart, do Dick and Nicole, however much they are being used here as stand-ins for Fitzgerald and his famously troubled wife Zelda.

What I enjoyed about "Tender Is The Night" is the wonderful sense of place one gets, right from the beginning when we see the coast of France from a hotel "and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach." Fitzgerald overloads on the adjectives and adverbs, it seems more than usual for him, but his amazing craft carries this off to solid and sometimes spectacular effect. There are a hundred perfect sentences buried in this book, sometimes attached to killer paragraphs: "In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."

Reading prose like that made me hungry for the deeper experience of other Fitzgerald works, not only the impossibly perfect "Gatsby" but "The Beautiful And Damned," which like "Tender" is focused on a couple's travails within a social set but of a more engaging, visceral, humorously-alive kind. The problem with Fitzgerald is he's a good writer here, but looking rather lost in comparison to his younger self.

I and most of my contemporaries were smitten by novels even before we first encountered F. Scott Fitzgerald in our adolescence. And then most of those among us who didn't already adore good fiction became lifelong addicts when they first read The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night. (The few remaining holdouts were those unlucky enough to have been cursed in their cradles by the Wicked Fairy VG -- the awful VIDEO GAMES, killer of brain cells and mistress of illiteracy). Why then the ensuing years of skimming Fitzgerald's books when we saw new editions and not feeling the thrill of our first encounter with the work? Had we just been deceived in the first place, perhaps by our youthful naivete? I was beginning to think that that was what had happened until I saw this edition -- and realized what an enormous difference a presentation can make. This quite wonderful new edition of Tender is the Night restored all the thrill of the first encounter. Buy this one, and you will perhaps recapture (as I did) that first fine careless rapture. And that sent me to the same source's edition of The Great Gatsby, which (I am happy to say) also thrilled me afresh and reminded me what a wonderful book can do. Buy both, and hope for more.

Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise was given a tentative thumbs-down by the literati of the day, most not understanding what Fitzgerald was trying to accomplish. And even today it's not a particularly easy read. From the standpoint of early twenty-first century, though, the book seems a precursor to postmodern literature, with its disjointed narrative, its social and political references, and above all, its overwhelming self-awareness. The book has been called a critique of humanity's attraction to glamour, but that hardly seems the complete story.
Amory Blaine is a well-to-do, bratty WASP - egoistic, handsome, with a glib mouth. Underlying all this is an insecurity that begins to show its teeth during Amory's Princeton days, as his mum dies and leaves him with nothing of value. He turns to girls for succor, but he quickly discovers, in the way of early twentieth-century life in the U.S., that his looks, his disarming way, have little truck without a serious jingle in his pocket.
So Amory enters into a series of promising but ultimately unfulfilling romances, joins the army during World War I, and returns to life as a menial ad copy writer. His conscience during this time is a Catholic priest, Thayer Darcy, who has had a dalliance with Amory's mum in days past. But Amory can't be corralled by faith and religion. He does, though, offer to sacrifice himself before the law in order to save a friend's reputation. Still, even this turns to spoiled milk.
In the book's final pages, Fitzgerald offers a clumsy, summarizing motif: Amory is given a ride by two well-off, conservative men, and they enter into an argument concerning what today would be Milton Friedman's capitalism versus socialism. I was stunned as I read these pages - how appropriate that argument seems to today's bare-knuckled conflicts over the same ideological ground!

Fitzgerald's writing here is brilliant in places, but his structure seems of the ad hoc variety. As with the argument mentioned above, many of the book's themes and situations are handled clumsily or are dropped unfinished as the author moves on to other ideas. At its basis it's a bildungsroman. But there's also Amory's fall from grace, which establishes his reinvention, something that was a religio-literary staple of the day. In the end, Fitzgerald leaves Amory disillusioned but hopeful. In the final paragraphs, Amory sums up thusly:

"It's all a poor substitute at best," he said sadly.
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed....
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."
Still, that 's a start, as this supremely talented writer began a slow, awkward climb toward a never-achieved literary perfection.

The only Fitzgerald I had ever read was GATSBY. After seeing the new film version, I decided I'd like to read some more Fitzgerald. THIS SIDE OF PARADISE had been on my list for a long time. I have to confess that I was a little disappointed. It's a coming-of-age story set in the World War I era about a spoiled rich boy who goes to Princeton. It contains some keen observations on the lives of the American rich during that period that made it worth reading for me, but as a novel, is clumsily written and appears to have been cobbled together from several works set in the same milieu. The seams show. But as a sociological document I think it's quite valuable. I certainly wouldn't regard this as essential reading, but if one already has in interest in Fitzgerald, this is not a waste of time.

This particular edition is beautifully designed. Even if you have no intention of reading it, the gorgeous art-deco styled cover makes a splendid prop for the interior decorator trying to project an image of glamor and sophistication.

One of the best works of American literature ever, "Tender is the Night" is often overlooked due to the popularity of Fitzgerald's more well known work, "The Great Gatsby." In my opinion, great works of American literature simultaneously capture the time in which they are set, and perfectly arc these struggles and triumphs to wider, common themes. Somewhat reflective of his own life, Tender tells the story of a psychiatrist who pulls a reverse Florence Nightingale and falls for one his is patients before she's truly better. The resultant relationship is less than perfect, but he struggles with duty to his vows, and the longings of his heart when a new interest- scandalous in her own way- makes her way on his scene.

As always, reading Fitzgerald is like watching an author make slow, passionate love to the dictionary. He's brilliant with words, but not hifalutin like many of his contemporaries. What he tells is a captivating bittersweet tale of confusions and conflict, set against a beautiful backdrop of pain, joy and strife.

Tender Is the Night by legendary author F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicles the tragic fall from grace of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist. Through most of the book's angst laden narrative, Dr. Diver has only one patient, Nicole Diver, his wealthy and beautiful wife.

The reader's introduction to the Divers is through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, an 18 year old silent screen starlet, as she meets the Divers and their entourage on the French Riviera. Rosemary falls madly in love with the charismatic doctor whose supremely confident demeanor makes him the focus of attention wherever he goes. As the story slowly unfolds, Rosemary is relegated to minor character status and Fitzgerald concentrates on describing the relationship between Dick and Nicole.

We learn how the two met while Nicole was hospitalized in a Swiss psychiatric facility and how it was they decided to marry. Nicole's wealth allows them to live like royalty as they make Europe their playground. But eventually Dick succumbs to alcoholism and his career and marriage suffer as a result.

Tender Is the Night had special meaning for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who reportedly worked on it over a 9 year period from 1925 to 1934. His wife, Zelda, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who was no stranger to Swiss psychiatric hospitals and Fitzgerald himself battled alcoholism. Unfortunately, whatever deep meaning the author intended this novel to convey is not at all apparent. Most readers will see this book as a disjointed collection of curious anecdotes about spoiled rich people.

Reading Tender Is the Night in its entirety is a tough slog. I'm not sure the story it has to tell justifies the effort.

The novel tells the story of the Nicole and Dick Diver, a wealthy, American couple living in Europe in the early 20th century. As the story opens they are introduced to a young movie actress, Rosemary, who is infatuated with Dick and with the lifestyle the Divers and their friends enjoy. Slowly Rosemary, and the reader, watches the Divers' marriage disintegrate, and Dick, in particular, descend into alcoholic despair.

There is no question that Fitzgerald could write brilliantly. It is a complex and thought-provoking look at human failing, at fear and weakness, and at self-destruction. However, I could not stand any of the characters, and really did not care what happened to them. Maybe it's his focus on this very hedonistic lifestyle. This is not the first work by Fitzgerald I've read and I've had a similar reaction in the past. I've also read books by other authors who shone a bright light on a wealthy class - Edith Wharton for example - without feeling that same disconnection with their characters or complete distaste for their lifestyle. I give it 4 stars based on the strength of Fitzgerald's writing; it is full of exquisitely crafted passages which simply took my breath away.

Trevor White does a wonderful job of performing the audio book. His pacing and voice inflection breathed life into the characters.

Part of the problem with Fitzgerald's being affiliated with a prized novel, The Great Gatsby, is that the author's other novels must be compared to it. I use this as an opening because, while the instances of early talent in the writer are here in his debut novel, the story, even though richly autobiographical, fell a little flat. Maybe this is part due to the fact that for a good deal of the book the protagonist, Amory Blaine, is pretty much synonymous with the shallow, aimless generation that Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation authors tried to depict. With the exception of minor moments of insight late in the novel, Amory is as superficial as the world seems around him.

Some have a problem with the experimental format of This Side of Paradise. It is written as a narrative, poem, drama, letter and journal. I didn't feel that way, and thought it gave a unique aspect to the novel. Fitzgerald's technique seems to coincide with the modern novel of experimenting with narrative. However, the story's subject itself clearly comes across as an author working into his craft, rather than having perfected it.

Within the story, Amory Blaine searches for identity and meaning of life amid outside influences--his mother, the world, the war, his acquaintances at school, his friendships, and his loves. While there were some moments of insight, the story comes across as a bit flat and meandering. In the final estimation, the characters were a bit too artificial.

Fitzgerald's movement towards perfecting his skill is evidenced, however. There are some valid insightful moments for the protagonist in the book's concluding pages, and Fitzgerald's style is evidenced in these brief snapshots. Fitzgerald's style would be perfected later in The Great Gatsby.

This pretty much takes me back to my original argument. The Great Gatsby is vastly superior in terms of depth, narrative and likability of main protagonist than This Side of Paradise. Not to say that there isn't a glimpse of talent here, and future higher achievements, but I'd rather be reading The Great Gatsby.

This is a complex coming of age tale about a young man that doesn't really come of age. The young protagonist, Amory Blaine, struggles to find and accept the real person he is as his "fundamental self" and his "conformist self" clash throughout. Amory has a few personality traits (an unreasonable sense of entitlement --possibly from overpampering-- and general lack of self-confidence masked by glibness) that also hinder him from attempting to find out who he is. I found him to be a very frustrating, yet real character that seems completely relatable. Amory has alot on his plate by society's views. He knows he's supposed to do what's necessary to achieve the American Dream, and even though he has been given all the comforts (good money, good schools) and advantages to better achieve that dream, it's not enough. He is confused by why these opportunities aren't just falling into his lap, since by society's views he's doing everything right. He goes through the motions, but finds nothing inspiring. He is constantly sizing himself up to his peers and is jealous that they seem to have something to stand for and he can't seem to feel anything but ambivalence for all situations he's in. His character is so young and naive that you can't help but feel sorry for him. He spends the whole book putting on airs when inside he's a confused and scared kid. While he is a wise-mouth, he is not a wise person. Even the end of the novel is as unsure as he is. I thought it was really humanizing and almost reassuring to see a character out there that is so flawed and realistic.

Published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel was wildly controversial, critically lauded, and an instant bestseller. Read today, it may be difficult to understand why; the story is a highly episodic "bildungroman" of a pampered, arrogant young man as he drifts with noticeable lack of appreciation through corridors of power and pleasure without absorbing much in the way of insight. But it is precisely because of that THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was felt to be such a shocker in its era: the very notion that any one would write a novel about such a slacker was controversial and new. Amory Blaine is among the first "anti-heroes" of the 20th Century, the opening salvo in a literary tradition that would eventually encompass everything from CATCHER IN THE RYE to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST to CATCH-22.

In addition to its unexpected apathy, PARADISE was also considered shocking for its portrait of women. Certainly many writers, including numerous female authors, had written about women intelligently--but Fitzgerald stands astride the shift between what was and what is. A society belle of earlier generations would never admit to having been kissed before marriage; the "popular daughter" of the 1910s was not only kissed, she actively connived at it, and she didn't mind talking about it afterward. Fitzgerald's portraits of these seemingly new creatures, who had money and social background, who stayed out late and necked in strange apartments, and who didn't seem to give a damn about what people of thought of them, is at once tender and icy cold. To say that the portrait horrified the parents of teenage girls from New York to California would be a significant understatement.

At the time of its publication, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was considered "an experimental novel," largely because Fitzgerald shifts between several different narrative styles as the book progresses. At the time it seemed very fresh and new, but in truth the effect was not so much designed as accidental: the novel was cobbled together from Fitzgerald's earlier, unpublished writings, and the contrasts and shifts that seemed fresh and new in 1920 quickly came to feel uneven afterward. Fitzgerald never made the same mistake. His later works would be planned, written and re-written, and polished to an almost superhuman degree. But in spite of the book's uneven narrative, it is very much what we think of when we think of Fitzgerald as a writer: sparks of poetry illuminating the psychology of slightly uncertain, often dubious characters, all interwoven with the hazards of careless wealth and incautious romance. Critics of the day hailed him as a major new talent, and his major works continue to stand the test of time.

Like most of Fitzgerald's novels, PARADISE is distinctly autobiographical in nature. The novel begins with a portrait Amory as a child, son of a non-descript father and the fabulously wealthy, wildly pretentious, and ridiculously eccentric Beatrice--whose influence is one of self-indulgent ennui. In a fit of social ambition, Amory decides to depart from his mother's pseudo-intellectualism and European pretensions and "go to school," enduring an unpleasant stint at an eastern prep school before entering Princeton. But although he rejects his mother's way of life, he is still very much her child; he is a superficial student at best, and he drifts through everything from superficial romances to philosophy class to The Great War without seeming to profit from the experience. An arrogant slacker, he arrives at the end of the novel to find himself without any personal resources, either tangible or internal. What is the point? In forcing the reader to that question, Fitzgerald effectively summed up the attitude of an entire generation. What was it all for? Why do we bother? Perhaps the best any of us can hope is a little comfort here and there and a good time along the way. It was an attitude that marked the beginning of the 1920s roar.

The novel is particularly distinguished by a sense of irony. Amory may not be a likeable person, but the follies of youth--most particularly its pretensions--have not changed significantly over years, and Fitzgerald plays them out with a dry sense of humor that makes the careful reader wince time and again. Amory is indeed insufferable, but so have most of us been at one time or another, and the effect is comic, embarrasing, ridiculous, and at times down right painful. It is also particularly memorable, as many have pointed out, for its brilliant portrait of Princeton during the 1910s; indeed, the school becomes a major character in the novel, and while Amory develops a romantic appreciation of it, his great failure is that he never bothers to scratch the romantic surface in search of the core values that support it. It is, as Fitzgerald himself might have said, the curse of the mother visited on the son, a wallow in luxury without an appreciation for the hard work that supports it.

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE is not really much read these days, and on the occasions that is read, it is usually read by those who are already fans of later Fitzgerald works such as THE GREAT GATSBY and TENDER IS THE NIGHT. It may well be that it is best left to such; I find it hard to believe that the typical reader, if there is such a thing, will be able to grasp what made it so unexpected in 1920. I do recommend it, flawed though it is, but this is really a novel that for all its beauties is probably best left to hardcore fans.

GFT, the store Reviewer

I love The Great Gatsby.

So, naturally I was really excited to read another one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels.

However, I am feeling very underwhelmed. I acknowledge that this was his first book, but it just wasn't near as good as Gatsby. I loved the romantic sections and the beautiful descriptive language, but I just couldn't get interested in the character of Amory Blaine. His endless search for himself amongst the social conventions of the 1920s just didn't seem very pressing and relevant, as opposed to the enduring themes of the corruption of the American Dream presented in Gatsby. This book did do a goo job of describing the era and the shifting roles of women. Over the course of the novel, Amory falls in love with three women. Two of which are very independent and free, which was unprecedented for the time period. With Rosalind, I saw a lot of the parallels to Gatsby as well as the actual life of Fitzgerald. The idea that if the woman didn't have access to a lot of money, she would cease to be the same woman seems to be a very common theme.

So, while I understand why this book was important as the work that established Fitzgerald as one of the biggest writers about the 1920s I wasn't particularly impressed with the characters or plot.

Dick Diver is at "a fine age for a man." At twenty nine Dr. Diver is a doctor who treats the mentally ill and writes respected tomes on the subject. Nicole is nineteen- a spry wisp of wealth and intelligence. Nicole's demented letters hint of a growing dependence and unnatural affection for the young doctor which blossoms into a marriage and family. The couple meet during the first horror of a pockmarked century as World War One scars Europe. Doctor Diver is a US Army doctor safely ensconced in Switzerland as Europe broils.

The clouds of war pass and reveal the Twenties with its false wealth and leisure class resting on an uncertain pedestal of nebulous wealth. Beach parties on the Riviera reveal the class fissures that were to split society ten years later. Life goes on as Fitzgerald's brave new world of Twenties leisure gives way to strife and affairs.
Nicole becomes involved with Tommy who never leaves the dark past of the trenches and challenges Dick with the primal reality of war remembered. In the end everything declines and tinsel gives way to the darkness that envelops our beginnings and ends as it must.

Published in 1933 the book was the product of ten years of constant revisions stored in six large archive boxes. The book outlived its time and became marooned in the grim world of economic crises and class struggle. Beached in a foreign land and no longer relevant to the time of its creation. A gaily festooned party boat mired in a dark swamp. The prose is descriptive and isolated...popping out like shafts of light on a foggy night.

A journey back to the ancestral graveyard in Virgina is Dick's brief flirtation with Faulkner's funeral trip in "As I Lay Dying"..."The souls made in the new earth in the forest heavy darkness of the seventeenth century."

Much dialog has a time capsule quality to it... "spent coon" or perhaps the provocative ..."Lucky Dick you big stiff" whispers Dick as he concludes "you hit it"... shades of Henry Miller perhaps. Has slang changed that much since 1933?

Interesting scenery passes and is richly described..."the fluorescent waters of the Riviera simmer in the moon." The newly restored trenches and excavated weapons of the Great War next to newly buried graves are described only ten years after the chaos. A grieving sister looks for a recent grave in vain after the War Department gives her a wrong registration number. The past was much closer in 1933.

Like a troubled patient this book meanders and wanders. The book expanded and contracted itself many times like a wheezing accordion... striking the wrong notes to perhaps serve some compulsive purpose in Fitzgerald's own troubled life. Perhaps. The preface, appendix and footnotes tell the tale of this meandering story. We are left to guess about the intent of Fitzgerald since time has dimmed much detail. The dialog is disorganized- perhaps appropriate for a tale about lunacy- but probably due to the large number of revisions.

In the end the Fall occurs as fate weaves its deadly teleos. After all ... Adam's fall cursed us all and the good doctor does not stand outside the cosmos as God does. Diver must out of necessity fall. Dick and Nicole reverse roles and the vitality once in the young doctor transfers as a mysterious process to the young woman. Obscurity envelopes Dick as he wanders through a myriad of small towns becoming increasingly tiny... very small indeed as sprinkles on a cupcake.

Perhaps colorful, but finally just disorganized sprinkles ...the prose and the ever diminished doctor.

The French Riviera. The American expatriate community. Beaches. Glamour. Wealth. No one else has the ability to portray the jazz age quite like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in "Tender is the Night", he doesn't disappoint.

Rosemary Hoyt is a young movie actress who has been a sensation in exactly one film when she heads to the Riviera with her mother. While on the beach one day, she meets Nicole and Dick Divers, as well as some of their friends, and becomes an "in" with their set. Dick is a handsome, charming, psychiatrist, formerly employed in Zurich but now living on a permanent holiday; Nicole is his young wife, glamorous, beautiful, and nice to a fault.

Initially uncomfortable with those surrounding the Divers, Rosemary quickly develops a crush on Dick, feelings which might not exactly be unrequited. But he and his wife are solid, and their whirlwind life of parties and knowing the right people keeps them always busy. There is a secret, however - a secret so big that one who accidentally witnesses it is shocked beyond words.

If "The Great Gatsby" is the ultimate look at the American Dream, "Tender is the Night" is perhaps one of the ultimate looks at who we are as individuals, how much we influence each other, and how much those around us influence the people we become. Divided into three sections, the first focuses on the glamorous life of the Riviera, while the second goes deep into Dick and Nicole's past, their marriage, and their lives in the years following Part 1. The last section of the book is the result of the two previous parts, the consequences of actions and choices, and the rebirth and deterioration of human relationships.

My only disappointment in this book was that it wasn't entirely focused - while Part 1 sets it up to see as if the book will be told through Rosemary's eyes, the other two sections feature her as a side character (if she appears at all). I don't know if it would have been as strong being told through Dick and Nicole's point of view, but it would have made a bit more sense.

If you're expecting "The Great Gastby" Take 2, this book isn't it. But if you like Fitzgerald's writing and are eager to see what else he had to say about the extraordinary time he was living in, this is a great one to pick up.

Two things about 'This Side of Paradise' will leave a lifelong impression on me. I've only just finished the novel, but I already know that its marks will remain embedded in me like luminescent sparks fallen from the starry skies of literature. The first thing impressed on me, Amory Blaine. Never have I connected with a protagonist more than I have with him. I know his thoughts and musings well, for many of his notions and ideals mirror my own. For good or ill. Amory is my favorite character in literature. The second thing impressed on me from the reading of this book is the way that it was written. Reading of the escapades of Amory was like reading a journal of his that was stuffed with hidden folded letters and notes, scraps of poetry and fiction and even sections of a play. I've never read a novel written like this, and I am extremely impressed that it was F. Scott Fitzgerald's first published work. This is a groundbreaking work.
As always, Fitzgerald's writing was lyrical, descriptive, flowery, and composed of such outstanding memorable prose as to be set apart and above the work of Fitzgerald's contemporaries. Ernest Hemingway will remain my favorite writer, but I can say with assurance that Fitzgerald's talent with words is much more pronounced, though not as true and gripping. Fitzgerald's prose, though phenomenal, has a way of wandering aimlessly in a charming way.
This was a novel I'd started reading at some point last fall, stopped, and only recently started again. I'm not sure why it took me so long, pausing to finish other novels by other writers. What I can say is that I read this novel in they way that Fitzgerald wrote it: in scraps and tatters, half-remembered fragments, until today, in a feverish pace, I read 'This Side of Paradise' from somewhere around its middle to its end. This book, now completed, was absolutely astonishing, a marvel. I can easily see how this novel was instrumental in ushering in the Jazz Age.
I recommend starting Fitzgerald's collection with 'Tales of the Jazz Age' and maybe 'The Great Gatsby', but 'This Side of Paradise' should certainly be coming up next on the reading list. Amory Blaine doesn't disappoint, and you'll never read another book like it.

Oh, Brother !!! This book is just about nothing else but incoherent wordy rants. Fitzgerald pulls a Conztanza even when pulling a Conztanza wasn't even invented yet !!!!.
The main character is an unlikable , unrelatable annoying young man who goes around life expecting everything by doing next to nothing.
The story (if any) is complicated with a bunch of philosophies that makes the reader unable to understand what the author meant. To be honest , i am not sure what i did just read ...i started skipped entire sections in hopes that it will get interesting ,but never did. It is a total mess .Probably someone from that era could had related to this story ...but as today in 2016 just not !.

Before the decade of the Twenties became known for its flappers with bobbed hair and a general freedom for America's youth, F. Scott Fitzgerald advertised those possibilities in his first novel, "This Side of Paradise."

Fitzgerald wrote parts of the novel while a student at Princeton, based on his own experiences. He was a mediocre student at the Ivy League institution, but obtained an education nevertheless by performing with a college theatre group called the Triangle Club and reading literature, much like Amory Blaine, the main character of the novel. Just before he enlisted in the army for the Great War, Fitzgerald tried to get a first draft of his novel published. After the Armistice was signed, Fitzgerald worked as an artist for an advertising firm before quitting, moving to Minnesota, and reworking the novel.

Mass consumerism and mass marketing developed after the Second Industrial Revolution in America. Businesses found that a catchy slogan and well-constructed advertising sold their products. As others caught on, advertising became required. A popular political cartoon of the day reflected the importance of advertising. In the cartoon, an inventor fell asleep outside the door of his out-of-the-way cottage. The reader realizes that building a better mousetrap doesn't guarantee that people will buy the new product, especially if they do not know about it.

Advertising firms hired artists like Amory Blaine to construct the advertisements for these products. Advertisements were featured in newspapers and weekly publications, who hired talented writers to compose short stories to entice the public to read their journals and thus, improve their viability to advertisers. Prices fell as the journals made their profits on selling advertisement. Fitzgerald's short time as an artist with an advertising firm, and his subsequent career as an artist of short stories were as much a fabric of the Twenties as the hedonism in the novel that most readers responded to.

Two of the love interests of Amory Blaine, Isabelle Borgé and Rosalind Connage, were based on real-life loves of Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was able to get the girl in real life that Amory Blaine could not. The fame generated by his first novel improved Fitzgerald's earnings potential and made him a viable suitor. Thomas Parke D'Invilliers and Monsignor Darcy were also based on friends of Fitzgerald. Amory's mother, Beatrice Blaine, was based on a mother of a friend.

Critics loved the novel, citing it as the only adequate study of the contemporary American adolescent and young adult. Universities condemned Amory Blaine's impression of college life as a country-club atmosphere of snobbery even though colleges, at the time, were primarily composed of students of well-to-do families from prestigious high-school academies. American adolescents and young adults experimented with the drinking and casual kissing outlined in the novel, creating a new sea of morals for the Roaring Twenties. The mass-produced automobile, available to more customers because of its low price, brought mobility into the life of people. Young lovers could get away from judgmental eyes, and they did.

Other notable authors produced stories on similar topics later in the decade. Sinclair Lewis wrote of a middle-aged George Babbitt catching the seven-year itch and going on a drunken spree of debauchery. Oil! of Upton Sinclair also explored the era's possibilities with Bunny Ross, the son of a wealthy oil mogul. These two heavy hitters of literature helped capture the spirit of The Roaring Twenties, but the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the era. This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby are required reading for anyone looking to explore the changing cultural fabric of American society in the Twenties.

Comparisons between Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby are inevitable. Both are viewed as his most complete artistic visions; and both are in the enviable position of being on the Modern Libraries list of the 100 best pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.

Gatsby is gorgeously written, and the language is expressive, nuanced, and multi-leveled. One can read and re-read Gatsby and find new things with each reading. A better definition of a classic I cannot find. Gatsby is also a radically economical novel. Coming in at just 50,000 words, it is nearly a novella. A short book, it seems long due to its reputation and genius. But in the end, it is petite, and Fitzgerald had to work within the confines of this short narrative structure.

Not so with Tender is the Night. At 108,000 words, the novel allows Fitzgerald to sprawl; in the course of the novel, we see far less compressed development of the characters than in Gatsby. There are far more graphic representations of scene, the flow of time, and the outcome of events. Tender shows the reader how good Fitzgerald could be in a longer form. He stretches his wings, and the results are astonishing. It is a moving and tragic novel of love and life gone astray.

Even with some of the novel's problems (does the text really give us enough of Nichole's insanity? Is Dick Diver's descent given enough grounding) Tender is the perfect accompaniment to Gatsby and Gatsby to Tender. For writers, it shows that if lighting does not exactly strike twice, similar results can be produced by and expressed by the same electric charge.

Tender is the Night describes the life and unraveling of a young doctor, Dick Diver, who lived in the 1930's in Paris. The book describes Dick's marriage to Nicole and Dick's love affair with Rosemary, a young actress. This novel is a touching story and a worthwhile read. However, it grapples with some very deep and complex themes, and therefore may leave the reader with more questions than answers.

Tender is the Night wrestles with the powers and limits of several different kinds of love - father, Healer, and Lover. I have written my review about these three kinds of love because I think these themes are central to the understanding of the novel.

For many women it is difficult to untangle between what they need from a man and what they still need from their daddy. Emotionally and psychologically, there can be a fair amount of overlap between the two roles. Physically, however, there is no overlap. Sex with a father is inappropriate and damaging. From the male's perspective, many men enjoy being the savior of the damsel in distress and find it empowering to become the daddy the girl never had. But again there comes a point when the man tires of being a savior/daddy figure and just wants to be a man who is loved for himself without it being predicated on his ability to save or heal. Many men try to give away too much of themselves, and then like Dick, they end up defeated and drained.

Tender is the Night deals with these complex relationships. The love between Dick Diver and Nicole is based on his ability to be her savior/healer. She is his life's work, Fitzgerald notes. The question posed by the book is, however, is this a healthy foundation for a marriage? It means Nicole has to remain sick to continue needing Dick, and he has to forbear on his dreams so he can concentrate on her needs only. How long can this last? The book seems to indicate that this cannot last long. Eventually, Dick tires of his role and becomes resentful of Nicole. Nicole, from her end, keeps her end of the bargain and her illness persists throughout the marriage. However, as soon as she decided to leave Dick and become her own healer, her illness improves. Did Dick and Nicole ever love each other? Maybe; it's an open question.

The theme continues with Rosemary who becomes famous by starring in a film called "Daddy's Girl." Rosemary too is looking for a daddy but for other reasons. She has not been abused by her father like Nicole but has never known her father. She adores Dick in a childish way and yearns to be sexually intimate with him for the wrong reasons; she just wants a daddy figure. Dick responded to her initially by being exactly what she needed him to be--a kind father figure who refused to be intimate with her. But then, just like with Nicole, he couldn't remain the heroic, idealized man for too long. Eventually, Dick gives in and becomes intimate with Rosemary. But Rosemary is disappointed; she liked him better when he was a daddy figure who stood on high moral ground. Was there ever any love between Rosemary and Dick? Again, it's an open question.

Who was Dick? Dick tried to be a hero and healer but eventually he couldn't keep up with the high standards he set for himself. He then began to unravel. He might have fared better had he set lower standards. Many commentators have noted that the events in this novel mirror the events in Fitzgerald's personal life. And this may explain why the Fitzgerald describes Dick Diver's descent into alcoholism without any sympathy. Fitzgerald was hard on his character (Dick Diver) because he was hard on himself - too hard. Dick Diver and men like him deserve sympathy. Dick Diver genuinely wanted to be the perfect man who healed all broken hearts and comforted all broken spirits. In the end, however, it was his heart and spirit that needed mending.

This is perhaps one of the best stories for a twenty-something year old to read during the recession, especially if they have had to set aside their dreams and currently search for something less than extraordinary in order to survive. It is amazing how relevant it is even so long after the emergence of the Jazz Age. Where the book was focused on the clash between old Victorian ideals and the emerging youth liberalization after the first World War, today we find ourselves just as lost. These wars that we've been fighting and this recession that we are suffering through will redefine our nation just as it was redefined after the conflict of WWI. The question is how?

Amory is caught in the very center of this clash between Victorian conservatism and youth liberalization. It is up to him and the other young men and women of the times to either create the new new, or stick with the old. I see the character of Amory Blaine in the face of all my college friends who had dreams of what their lives would be like after graduation, only to have those dreams dashed upon the rocks of this recession. Let us all pray that in the end we don't end up like Fitzgerald, who modeled his character Amory after himself. Let us hope that we don't follow in the path of Amory and are able to regain our aspirations when things improve, otherwise we might drown our hopelessness in bottles of alcohol until it kills us just like the famed U.S. author that wrote this book.

I remember my first experience reading it, back in 11th grade. It is not really the best book for high schoolers, but perhaps in that suburban milieu of doctors' kids and dissolving marriages, it was a good choice. Another reason I wanted to read it was that a Fitzgerald biography said this was pretty much FSF's take on his own, deeply troubled, marriage.

The book begins from the point of view of an innocent - Rosemary Hoyt, an American movie star (this was the 1920s) visiting some people on the Cote d'Azur, at a fictitious place on the shore between Cannes and St. Tropez. She quickly falls for an older man, an American doctor named Dick Diver who is married to a beautiful, and very rich, woman named Nicole. On the surface, everything is beautiful, glamorous, luxurious, and rich. But below there is trouble - quarrels, drunkenness, crazy behavior, homosexuality, and other ills. Rosemary doesn't see it though, and with the stubbornness of a beautiful, naïve girl, she goes after Dick. He resists, but begins to fall in love with her. There is a cast of supporting characters such as Abe North, a wacky drunk, and Tommy Barban, a hotheaded young Frenchman with a military career behind him. '

Rosemary is drawn in, as the reader is, and as the wealthy but mentally disturbed Nicole Warren was. Dick radiates calm, knowledge, success, strength, and joie de vivre. As the story turns to the Divers' marital history, the impressions alter, and the book becomes the tale of Dick's undoing. Diver was a young, hardworking, Yale educated doctor at a clinic in Switzerland. A young, but seriously troubled (probably schizophrenic, as Zelda Fitzgerald was, although this word is not used) gets the hots for him, and against everyone's advice, Dick marries her. She has a mindlessly arrogant rich girl sister, named Baby, who is portrayed superbly. Dick and Nicole have a couple of kids and some good times, but he is as much her medical caretaker as he is her husband, and it starts to wear him down. Things start unravelling. The whole book has a tragic, downward trajectory, a feeling of impending misery that no amount of sunlight and good wine and comfortable surroundings can dispel. '

The book is a downer, but it is a fascinating one, with moments of brilliant writing. Fitzgerald can string words together and juxtapose them with sparkle and casual elegance. The characters' conversations are real and believable, as are the depictions of gay people (ahead of its time, I should think) and the playful rich. It is a very good novel, and deserves to be remembered even if it is not the icon that The Great Gatsby is. No doubt there is some satisfaction in watching the Divers crumble, those people that had every advantage imaginable, but it is still a sad read, and the product of a great artist who was in a great deal of trouble.

As soon as I finished this book, I was ready to start all over and read it again. F. Scott Fitzgerald fills This Side of Paradise with his signature lyricism and beautiful phrasing, and combines it here with autobiographical elements and deep introspection. I love the maturity and wisdom with which Fitzgerald reflects on his own life through the story of Amory Blaine, and how it follows Blaine in times of extreme good and bad fortune, making it much more relatable than a standard tale that follows a hero's journey. I feel it is very descriptive and indicative of the time at which it was written, and I appreciate the way you can pick up on the overall feeling of the time without that explanation even being the focus of the story, which I believe is a nod to Fitzgerald's skill. Overall, I would highly recommend reading this book, ideally multiple times, so you can be sure to pick up on each layer of meaning and the motivation and thought behind each word. The story is one of much more than it might initially appear, and it goes much beyond just the life of Amory Blaine, delving into the pitfalls and feelings of the time period and of growing up in general. Readers can certainly draw parallels from this novel, relate them to their own lives, and even learn a little about how to approach their lives. I certainly did.

The first 40 pages is dull. So is the middle 100 pages. The ending is probably one of the most unsatisfying endings I've ever read as it ends not with not a bang but a sad whimper in diminuendo as if the author just didn't want to work on it anymore and dashed off a coda.

Fitzgerald's lyricism, in my opinion, is simply overrated. Granted, there are some breathtaking passages (which I took note of), but most of the writing was just dull, dull, dull. He would've benefited tremendously from studying storytelling as well since he makes the middle portion so deadly dull that it made me want to chuck it across the room, and butchers the last portion so badly that it came across as amateurish - choppy, rushed, and consequently ungraceful - which gives credence to his own remark about the book: "I would give anything if I hadn't had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant..."

He also makes tons of basic storytelling faux pas, such as redundant attributions (e.g. "I think so, too," he agreed), unnecessary and dull passages that add practically nothing to the story, a whole section (the middle section, more specifically from p.114 to 207) where we follow the main characters wander around without any specific objective except to kill time, and the last part that's haphazardly and painfully put together. The result is a very uneven book with deep pits of absolute boredom.

Didn't really like it

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second-highest regarded novel reveals the psyche of its tortured author. As a reading experience, it draws interest from the character of that author, equal parts eloquence and self-loathing. But it lacks the easy engagement and storycraft of Fitzgerald's other fiction.

Published in 1934, nine years after Fitzgerald's prior novel "The Great Gatsby" (and the only other novel after "Gatsby" Fitzgerald lived to complete), "Tender Is The Night" centers around a young, handsome couple who live as wealthy American expatriates on France's Mediterranean coast. Dick Diver is practical but somewhat frustrated, a situation exacerbated by the arrival of ingénue film actress Rosemary Hoyt. Encouraged by her mother, Rosemary takes a fancy to Dick and decides to lose her virginity to him. Dick's wife Nicole senses something is brewing, but her husband's fidelity is far from the only issue on her very full plate.

Two psychoanalytic profiles dominate this book. The first, of Nicole Diver, is shallow and unconvincing. The other, of the author himself, is far more engaging, if more a matter of connecting the dots between Fitzgerald and Dick than what the text itself affords. Dick, we come to learn, is a man of great potential, a leader in his chosen field who chooses to exile himself at the height of his success. As the book goes on, Dick descends deeper into alcohol and social-outcast status. While his profession is psychoanalysis, he is often found late in the novel working on a giant manuscript he never seems able to finish. The Fitzgerald parallels are obvious and will fascinate admirers.

But the novel feels thin at its core. I don't think I could put it any better than the title of Michael G.'s review from July 2011 - "Slender Is The Plot." Divided in three sections, each primarily seen through the lens of a different person - first Rosemary, then Dick, then Nicole - "Tender" is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about the continent, with people giving random voice to their concerns in the Age of Anxiety in-between squabbles and trysts. The characters seem more like narrative constructs than real people. Dick, for example, goes from solid citizen in the early and middle section (a large part of which is a flashback to an earlier period in his life) to dangerous drunk for no better reason it seems than a girl he pines for. Jimmy Buffett knew better than to lean on that excuse too hard, but it forms the spine of our story.

Fitzgerald seems more self-indulgent here, both in his writing (a lot of description gets troweled upon incidents of little or no importance to the larger story, like a visit to a World War I battlefield or the drunken antics of a doomed friend) and in what he writes about, with Dick reduced on account of allowing himself to be used by both his wife and his would-be mistress. It's not his fault he's so damn sexy! The drinking issue comes up as an afterthought, as if Fitzgerald felt lost without employing his trademark malady. But Dick's issues, like Nicole's, never seem very real. Neither, at their heart, do Dick and Nicole, however much they are being used here as stand-ins for Fitzgerald and his famously troubled wife Zelda.

What I enjoyed about "Tender Is The Night" is the wonderful sense of place one gets, right from the beginning when we see the coast of France from a hotel "and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach." Fitzgerald overloads on the adjectives and adverbs, it seems more than usual for him, but his amazing craft carries this off to solid and sometimes spectacular effect. There are a hundred perfect sentences buried in this book, sometimes attached to killer paragraphs: "In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."

Reading prose like that made me hungry for the deeper experience of other Fitzgerald works, not only the impossibly perfect "Gatsby" but "The Beautiful And Damned," which like "Tender" is focused on a couple's travails within a social set but of a more engaging, visceral, humorously-alive kind. The problem with Fitzgerald is he's a good writer here, but looking rather lost in comparison to his younger self.

I and most of my contemporaries were smitten by novels even before we first encountered F. Scott Fitzgerald in our adolescence. And then most of those among us who didn't already adore good fiction became lifelong addicts when they first read The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night. (The few remaining holdouts were those unlucky enough to have been cursed in their cradles by the Wicked Fairy VG -- the awful VIDEO GAMES, killer of brain cells and mistress of illiteracy). Why then the ensuing years of skimming Fitzgerald's books when we saw new editions and not feeling the thrill of our first encounter with the work? Had we just been deceived in the first place, perhaps by our youthful naivete? I was beginning to think that that was what had happened until I saw this edition -- and realized what an enormous difference a presentation can make. This quite wonderful new edition of Tender is the Night restored all the thrill of the first encounter. Buy this one, and you will perhaps recapture (as I did) that first fine careless rapture. And that sent me to the same source's edition of The Great Gatsby, which (I am happy to say) also thrilled me afresh and reminded me what a wonderful book can do. Buy both, and hope for more.

Scott Fitzgerald paints a perfect picture of how life and romance was around WWI. This Side of Paradise follows Amory Blaine. He’s described as handsome, very very intelligent but lazy when it comes to school, and he’s also born into his mother’s (Beatrice Blaine) wealth. He gets accepted into Princeton, and towards the end of his college days WWI begins and Amory enlists ditching his degree. His mother dies and oddly leaves him no money.  When he returns to America to mourn his mother, he falls in love with and gets engaged too Rosalind Connage, a debutante. However, because Amory is poor Rosalind called off the engagement. After that horrific heartache he drinks a lot and probably would’ve kept drinking if it wasn’t for the Prohibition. After the summer ends he walks back to Princeton and basically sums up the whole book in one sentence “I know myself but that is all-” (Fitzgerald p 261)
Overall, is you love romance and history this is the book for you. The Romance isn’t too heavy and neither his the history aspect. Fitzgerald has an amazing way of making a book based in a time so long ago relatable. “I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.” (Fitzgerald p.24) We’ve all been in a situation where we’re trying to find a place where we’ll belong and Fitzgerald really captured Amory’s want to be someone different than what he was but still be him. I really think this book as something for everyone, and I would highly recommend this book.

Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise was given a tentative thumbs-down by the literati of the day, most not understanding what Fitzgerald was trying to accomplish. And even today it's not a particularly easy read. From the standpoint of early twenty-first century, though, the book seems a precursor to postmodern literature, with its disjointed narrative, its social and political references, and above all, its overwhelming self-awareness. The book has been called a critique of humanity's attraction to glamour, but that hardly seems the complete story.
Amory Blaine is a well-to-do, bratty WASP - egoistic, handsome, with a glib mouth. Underlying all this is an insecurity that begins to show its teeth during Amory's Princeton days, as his mum dies and leaves him with nothing of value. He turns to girls for succor, but he quickly discovers, in the way of early twentieth-century life in the U.S., that his looks, his disarming way, have little truck without a serious jingle in his pocket.
So Amory enters into a series of promising but ultimately unfulfilling romances, joins the army during World War I, and returns to life as a menial ad copy writer. His conscience during this time is a Catholic priest, Thayer Darcy, who has had a dalliance with Amory's mum in days past. But Amory can't be corralled by faith and religion. He does, though, offer to sacrifice himself before the law in order to save a friend's reputation. Still, even this turns to spoiled milk.
In the book's final pages, Fitzgerald offers a clumsy, summarizing motif: Amory is given a ride by two well-off, conservative men, and they enter into an argument concerning what today would be Milton Friedman's capitalism versus socialism. I was stunned as I read these pages - how appropriate that argument seems to today's bare-knuckled conflicts over the same ideological ground!

Fitzgerald's writing here is brilliant in places, but his structure seems of the ad hoc variety. As with the argument mentioned above, many of the book's themes and situations are handled clumsily or are dropped unfinished as the author moves on to other ideas. At its basis it's a bildungsroman. But there's also Amory's fall from grace, which establishes his reinvention, something that was a religio-literary staple of the day. In the end, Fitzgerald leaves Amory disillusioned but hopeful. In the final paragraphs, Amory sums up thusly:

"It's all a poor substitute at best," he said sadly.
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed....
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."
Still, that 's a start, as this supremely talented writer began a slow, awkward climb toward a never-achieved literary perfection.

The only Fitzgerald I had ever read was GATSBY. After seeing the new film version, I decided I'd like to read some more Fitzgerald. THIS SIDE OF PARADISE had been on my list for a long time. I have to confess that I was a little disappointed. It's a coming-of-age story set in the World War I era about a spoiled rich boy who goes to Princeton. It contains some keen observations on the lives of the American rich during that period that made it worth reading for me, but as a novel, is clumsily written and appears to have been cobbled together from several works set in the same milieu. The seams show. But as a sociological document I think it's quite valuable. I certainly wouldn't regard this as essential reading, but if one already has in interest in Fitzgerald, this is not a waste of time.

This particular edition is beautifully designed. Even if you have no intention of reading it, the gorgeous art-deco styled cover makes a splendid prop for the interior decorator trying to project an image of glamor and sophistication.

One of the best works of American literature ever, "Tender is the Night" is often overlooked due to the popularity of Fitzgerald's more well known work, "The Great Gatsby." In my opinion, great works of American literature simultaneously capture the time in which they are set, and perfectly arc these struggles and triumphs to wider, common themes. Somewhat reflective of his own life, Tender tells the story of a psychiatrist who pulls a reverse Florence Nightingale and falls for one his is patients before she's truly better. The resultant relationship is less than perfect, but he struggles with duty to his vows, and the longings of his heart when a new interest- scandalous in her own way- makes her way on his scene.

As always, reading Fitzgerald is like watching an author make slow, passionate love to the dictionary. He's brilliant with words, but not hifalutin like many of his contemporaries. What he tells is a captivating bittersweet tale of confusions and conflict, set against a beautiful backdrop of pain, joy and strife.

Tender Is the Night by legendary author F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicles the tragic fall from grace of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist. Through most of the book's angst laden narrative, Dr. Diver has only one patient, Nicole Diver, his wealthy and beautiful wife.

The reader's introduction to the Divers is through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, an 18 year old silent screen starlet, as she meets the Divers and their entourage on the French Riviera. Rosemary falls madly in love with the charismatic doctor whose supremely confident demeanor makes him the focus of attention wherever he goes. As the story slowly unfolds, Rosemary is relegated to minor character status and Fitzgerald concentrates on describing the relationship between Dick and Nicole.

We learn how the two met while Nicole was hospitalized in a Swiss psychiatric facility and how it was they decided to marry. Nicole's wealth allows them to live like royalty as they make Europe their playground. But eventually Dick succumbs to alcoholism and his career and marriage suffer as a result.

Tender Is the Night had special meaning for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who reportedly worked on it over a 9 year period from 1925 to 1934. His wife, Zelda, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who was no stranger to Swiss psychiatric hospitals and Fitzgerald himself battled alcoholism. Unfortunately, whatever deep meaning the author intended this novel to convey is not at all apparent. Most readers will see this book as a disjointed collection of curious anecdotes about spoiled rich people.

Reading Tender Is the Night in its entirety is a tough slog. I'm not sure the story it has to tell justifies the effort.

The novel tells the story of the Nicole and Dick Diver, a wealthy, American couple living in Europe in the early 20th century. As the story opens they are introduced to a young movie actress, Rosemary, who is infatuated with Dick and with the lifestyle the Divers and their friends enjoy. Slowly Rosemary, and the reader, watches the Divers' marriage disintegrate, and Dick, in particular, descend into alcoholic despair.

There is no question that Fitzgerald could write brilliantly. It is a complex and thought-provoking look at human failing, at fear and weakness, and at self-destruction. However, I could not stand any of the characters, and really did not care what happened to them. Maybe it's his focus on this very hedonistic lifestyle. This is not the first work by Fitzgerald I've read and I've had a similar reaction in the past. I've also read books by other authors who shone a bright light on a wealthy class - Edith Wharton for example - without feeling that same disconnection with their characters or complete distaste for their lifestyle. I give it 4 stars based on the strength of Fitzgerald's writing; it is full of exquisitely crafted passages which simply took my breath away.

Trevor White does a wonderful job of performing the audio book. His pacing and voice inflection breathed life into the characters.

Part of the problem with Fitzgerald's being affiliated with a prized novel, The Great Gatsby, is that the author's other novels must be compared to it. I use this as an opening because, while the instances of early talent in the writer are here in his debut novel, the story, even though richly autobiographical, fell a little flat. Maybe this is part due to the fact that for a good deal of the book the protagonist, Amory Blaine, is pretty much synonymous with the shallow, aimless generation that Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation authors tried to depict. With the exception of minor moments of insight late in the novel, Amory is as superficial as the world seems around him.

Some have a problem with the experimental format of This Side of Paradise. It is written as a narrative, poem, drama, letter and journal. I didn't feel that way, and thought it gave a unique aspect to the novel. Fitzgerald's technique seems to coincide with the modern novel of experimenting with narrative. However, the story's subject itself clearly comes across as an author working into his craft, rather than having perfected it.

Within the story, Amory Blaine searches for identity and meaning of life amid outside influences--his mother, the world, the war, his acquaintances at school, his friendships, and his loves. While there were some moments of insight, the story comes across as a bit flat and meandering. In the final estimation, the characters were a bit too artificial.

Fitzgerald's movement towards perfecting his skill is evidenced, however. There are some valid insightful moments for the protagonist in the book's concluding pages, and Fitzgerald's style is evidenced in these brief snapshots. Fitzgerald's style would be perfected later in The Great Gatsby.

This pretty much takes me back to my original argument. The Great Gatsby is vastly superior in terms of depth, narrative and likability of main protagonist than This Side of Paradise. Not to say that there isn't a glimpse of talent here, and future higher achievements, but I'd rather be reading The Great Gatsby.

This is a complex coming of age tale about a young man that doesn't really come of age. The young protagonist, Amory Blaine, struggles to find and accept the real person he is as his "fundamental self" and his "conformist self" clash throughout. Amory has a few personality traits (an unreasonable sense of entitlement --possibly from overpampering-- and general lack of self-confidence masked by glibness) that also hinder him from attempting to find out who he is. I found him to be a very frustrating, yet real character that seems completely relatable. Amory has alot on his plate by society's views. He knows he's supposed to do what's necessary to achieve the American Dream, and even though he has been given all the comforts (good money, good schools) and advantages to better achieve that dream, it's not enough. He is confused by why these opportunities aren't just falling into his lap, since by society's views he's doing everything right. He goes through the motions, but finds nothing inspiring. He is constantly sizing himself up to his peers and is jealous that they seem to have something to stand for and he can't seem to feel anything but ambivalence for all situations he's in. His character is so young and naive that you can't help but feel sorry for him. He spends the whole book putting on airs when inside he's a confused and scared kid. While he is a wise-mouth, he is not a wise person. Even the end of the novel is as unsure as he is. I thought it was really humanizing and almost reassuring to see a character out there that is so flawed and realistic.

Published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel was wildly controversial, critically lauded, and an instant bestseller. Read today, it may be difficult to understand why; the story is a highly episodic "bildungroman" of a pampered, arrogant young man as he drifts with noticeable lack of appreciation through corridors of power and pleasure without absorbing much in the way of insight. But it is precisely because of that THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was felt to be such a shocker in its era: the very notion that any one would write a novel about such a slacker was controversial and new. Amory Blaine is among the first "anti-heroes" of the 20th Century, the opening salvo in a literary tradition that would eventually encompass everything from CATCHER IN THE RYE to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST to CATCH-22.

In addition to its unexpected apathy, PARADISE was also considered shocking for its portrait of women. Certainly many writers, including numerous female authors, had written about women intelligently--but Fitzgerald stands astride the shift between what was and what is. A society belle of earlier generations would never admit to having been kissed before marriage; the "popular daughter" of the 1910s was not only kissed, she actively connived at it, and she didn't mind talking about it afterward. Fitzgerald's portraits of these seemingly new creatures, who had money and social background, who stayed out late and necked in strange apartments, and who didn't seem to give a damn about what people of thought of them, is at once tender and icy cold. To say that the portrait horrified the parents of teenage girls from New York to California would be a significant understatement.

At the time of its publication, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was considered "an experimental novel," largely because Fitzgerald shifts between several different narrative styles as the book progresses. At the time it seemed very fresh and new, but in truth the effect was not so much designed as accidental: the novel was cobbled together from Fitzgerald's earlier, unpublished writings, and the contrasts and shifts that seemed fresh and new in 1920 quickly came to feel uneven afterward. Fitzgerald never made the same mistake. His later works would be planned, written and re-written, and polished to an almost superhuman degree. But in spite of the book's uneven narrative, it is very much what we think of when we think of Fitzgerald as a writer: sparks of poetry illuminating the psychology of slightly uncertain, often dubious characters, all interwoven with the hazards of careless wealth and incautious romance. Critics of the day hailed him as a major new talent, and his major works continue to stand the test of time.

Like most of Fitzgerald's novels, PARADISE is distinctly autobiographical in nature. The novel begins with a portrait Amory as a child, son of a non-descript father and the fabulously wealthy, wildly pretentious, and ridiculously eccentric Beatrice--whose influence is one of self-indulgent ennui. In a fit of social ambition, Amory decides to depart from his mother's pseudo-intellectualism and European pretensions and "go to school," enduring an unpleasant stint at an eastern prep school before entering Princeton. But although he rejects his mother's way of life, he is still very much her child; he is a superficial student at best, and he drifts through everything from superficial romances to philosophy class to The Great War without seeming to profit from the experience. An arrogant slacker, he arrives at the end of the novel to find himself without any personal resources, either tangible or internal. What is the point? In forcing the reader to that question, Fitzgerald effectively summed up the attitude of an entire generation. What was it all for? Why do we bother? Perhaps the best any of us can hope is a little comfort here and there and a good time along the way. It was an attitude that marked the beginning of the 1920s roar.

The novel is particularly distinguished by a sense of irony. Amory may not be a likeable person, but the follies of youth--most particularly its pretensions--have not changed significantly over years, and Fitzgerald plays them out with a dry sense of humor that makes the careful reader wince time and again. Amory is indeed insufferable, but so have most of us been at one time or another, and the effect is comic, embarrasing, ridiculous, and at times down right painful. It is also particularly memorable, as many have pointed out, for its brilliant portrait of Princeton during the 1910s; indeed, the school becomes a major character in the novel, and while Amory develops a romantic appreciation of it, his great failure is that he never bothers to scratch the romantic surface in search of the core values that support it. It is, as Fitzgerald himself might have said, the curse of the mother visited on the son, a wallow in luxury without an appreciation for the hard work that supports it.

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE is not really much read these days, and on the occasions that is read, it is usually read by those who are already fans of later Fitzgerald works such as THE GREAT GATSBY and TENDER IS THE NIGHT. It may well be that it is best left to such; I find it hard to believe that the typical reader, if there is such a thing, will be able to grasp what made it so unexpected in 1920. I do recommend it, flawed though it is, but this is really a novel that for all its beauties is probably best left to hardcore fans.

GFT, the store Reviewer

When first published in 1920 This Side of Paradise rapidly became a bestseller and launched the career of its 24 year old author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, is clearly a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself.
The book traces Amory's life from early childhood to young adulthood and describes in great detail his challenges and conflicts as he reaches maturity in the very turbulent second decade of the 20th century. Amory, like the author, becomes a Princeton man. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of This Side of Paradise is that Fitzgerald's unbridled nostalgia for his time spent at Princeton comes through loud and clear. (The fact that he never managed to graduate does not seem to have diminished his fond memories one iota.)
By his own admission, Amory is an egotistical elitist who has little or no empathy for the less fortunate lower classes. Much of the novel consists of Amory's introspection on the true nature of love, personal fulfillment, the relevance of religion and other equally obtuse subjects. This Side of Paradise is also a bit odd from a structural standpoint in that there is an overabundance of poetry interspersed with the prose and one of the more important chapters is written largely in the form of a play complete with lines of dialogue and stage direction.
Those inclined to criticize this book will see it as a hodgepodge of self-indulgence. But to the generation who came of age circa. 1920, it contained much that rang true.

This story is about Amory Blaine, a young man whose story we follow from his early childhood of great privilege through his college graduation to see him develop a great skepticism. It may have been his life's great economic downturn, maybe it was his poor luck at love, or maybe a mix of these and more led Amory to his new perspective. As readers we feel sorry for what has been forced to endure, but the silver lining comes as Amory and his mates discuss love, politics and growing up. The opinions they share are substantial, eye-opening, and they still ring true generations later.

This book was recommended to me a few years back by a friend. I asked her what her favorite book was and this was her response. It obviously took me awhile to get around to reading it, but I am glad I did. Better late than never, as they say.

I feel the book is best broken up into three sections: pre-college, college and post-college. And the first and third sections were my favorites. The pre-college section covers his childhood as Fitzgerald writes him as an Elizabethan "mack daddy." I laughed continuously as the young man with the silver tongue would, always minding his manners, attempt to seduce any woman he encountered.

The college section, which is the majority of the book, we begin to see the transformation of Amory Blaine. Through a group of friends that I found similar to the Dead Poets Society from the movie of the same name, Amory begins to finally see pain, suffering and injustice. He is handed a social conscience and wears it from then on as a badge of courage. This section of the book grew a little monotonous for me and was where I had to strengthen my resolve to get through it.

The post-college section, though somewhat pessimistic, was my favorite part of the book. In this final few chapters to the book I believe I found why my friend had recommended it. While I agreed with some of Amory's arguments at the end of the book and disagreed with others, I found them all to have merit. I must admit that I am even depressed that many of Amory's complaints about the state of society still plague society today. I applaud the author for writing a book that is still relevant so many years later.

This Side of Paradise is a short book where you may breeze through the beginning, lose interest in the middle, and become somewhat empassioned towards the end. I did not love this book, but I enjoyed parts of it a good deal. I'm glad to have now read some Fitzgerald other than just The Great Gatsby.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald left Princeton and joined the military, his belief that he would die at war led him to begin writing the autobiographical "This Side of Paradise." Written rather schizophrenically - alternating between prose, verse, letters, and stage direction - readers are given a unique and multifaceted introduction to Amory Blaine, the intellectual, perpetually disillusioned youth. As he stumbles through life attempting to figure out what he believes in, who he loves, and how he comes to terms with personal losses, it is impossible not to feel a little closer to the iconic author and his own internal struggles. Amory winds his way through the Midwest, Princeton, Europe, and New York, morphing his perspectives on everything from romanticism to socialism based on his experiences and especially his failures.

Fans of Fitzgerald will appreciate the beautiful writing of this work; his word choice and turn of phrase make him remarkably quotable. However, this book is also plagued by narcissism and an overabundance of crazy women with an affinity for poetry, which could prove too much for the reader taking Fitzgerald for a test drive. "The Great Gatsby" or "Tender is the Night" would make much better introductions that the majority would argue are simply better pieces of literature. While admitting to myself that this book was a bit bizarre and will never make it onto my "books I would take with me on a deserted island" list, I could not help enjoying it. This book may have revealed to me just how highly Fitzgerald thought of himself, but I tend to think pretty highly of him, too.

Fitzgerald's first novel, full of autobiographical undertones, has already the mark of the Lost Generation: a US that is frivolous, nouveau riche, at the same time innocent and perverse. Amory Blaine is the scion of a young American fortune. He's handsome, well read, and spoiled by his eccentric, alcoholic, and overpossessive mother, Beatrice, who gives him a bookish education while at the same time she carries him around the US, where he mixes with all kinds of people. During a stage of drinking problems, Beatrice sends his son to live with some relatives in Minneapolis, where Amory begins his flirting career with rich brats. Then comes life in Princeton, his first real love, his passive service in WWI, his first job in advertising, and a maturing process expressed as the full acceptance of egocentrism, which simultaneously adopts and kills his former religious and altruistic spirit. Religion becomes not so much conviction and mysticism, but a mere reference and moral containment. Similarly, Beauty stops meaning the appreciation of a transcendental experience, to be left only as an aesthetic perception of Pleasure. Amory Blaine becomes a kind of disenchanted Oscar Wilde, less caustic and more introspective. The game of playing to be Dorian Gray finishes in front of the difficulties of life, and what remains is not the criminal being, but the eternal dilettante. The apparent frivolity and emptiness of Amory's story is more than redeemed by the the poetic quality of the prose. Behind the merry life of a rich kid, the XX century is full fledged already: "a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken".

Although not yet in league with successive works, especially "The Great Gatsby", this book gives a good appreciation of how Fitzgerald would develop as a writer.

New Review

Every amateur writer, every young writer looking to make a breakthrough, and every avid reader always is confronted when reading the novels of famous authors like the one under review here F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night with wonder about how much of a story’s plotline is based on the author’s vivid imagination and how much on autobiographical or self-reference. As for the subject matter-mental illness, alcoholism, financial independence and the decline of one’s professional energies- in Fitzgerald’s book for once there is no need for such guesswork because during the period just before sitting down to write this well-written and vividly described book his wife had been hospitalized for some mental disorder, he was hustling like seven dervishes to raise cash, and was letting booze get the best of him (which in the end would contribute mightily to his early death a few years later). This in any case is his last completed novel (The Last Tycoon was unfinished) and while I personally rank The Great Gatsby as his greatest novel this one ranks just a step or two below that classic. (Fitzgerald himself ranked this one as his greatest effort although I don’t what he based that ranking on).
As already noted above this story line, set up as a series of flashbacks and flash forwards over “three books,” is the story of the rise and fall of one Dick Diver from the heights of his profession as a up and coming young psychiatrist to, not surprisingly, a middle aged man sunk in a downward rut and sunk in the depths of booze before the end when he winds up in some upstate backwater doing yeoman’s work as a country doctor. It is also the story, maybe better a cautionary tale, about the pitfalls of bedding and marrying one of your patients because that is what he does with the other main character his initially mentally fragile wife, Nicole Diver nee Warren (that nee is important since she came from serious robber baron money and Dick was lucky to have carfare on his own hook).
Dick and Nicole “meet” in a European sanatorium where Nicole has been deposited by her father after many unsuccessful attempts to cure her affliction elsewhere (there is a strong suggestion of incest as the cause). In the process of “curing” Nicole they fall in love and are married. This gives Dick for a time anyway room to pursue his budding career as a psychiatrist dealing with obscure mental illnesses. But it also creates tensions when it came to financial matters as Dick wanted some independence and of course Nicole was used to having plenty of dough. Created tensions as well when Nicole would for a long while during their marriage and parenthood have periodic relapses.
Most of the story takes place in European settings, mainly France, since as was the vogue in the Jazz Age by the alienated post-World War I intelligentsia that is where they went to get away from low-rent grasping America. A lot of the power of this novel is centered on the isolated existence that these ex-pats’ live as they hunker down amount themselves with romances, liaisons and wasted time. Dick’s life though as he approaches middle age is spiced up by an interest in a young starlet, Rosemary, who has come to Europe with her mother for the grand tour. This affair will end badly as the pair part after a long cat and mouse playing and as Rosemary rises in the film world and Dick succumbs to his own hubris (and alcohol, okay). Worse this affair affected Nicole, led to a few of her relapses. In the end as Dick declined Nicole got stronger, got strong enough to have an affair with one of the men in their circle and eventually divorced Dick as he stumbles downhill and married him (reminding me of the flow of Gide’s The Immoralist where the wife declines after saving the getting stronger life of her self-absorbed husband).
The beauty of this novel is not so much in the now fairly conventional story line but in the vivid descriptions of the characters, of the landscape, hell, like his friend Hemingway, of the food and of his use of metaphor that is nothing less than astounding. Not Gatsby, no question, since that literary effort summed up an age in one person is but a very good description of the rise and fall of a man of that same Jazz Age. Read this one, heck, read all of Fitzgerald.

Old Review
Scott Fitzgerald famously noted that the very rich are different from you and I. Agreed. However, in this tale of the wanderings of a segment of the post World War I "lost generation" one could argue that some things do not escape even the richest. I would note the scars left on Nicole Diver, nee Warren, by her father's incestuous behavior. I would further note the extreme mental problems that caused not only for Nicole's life but for Dick Diver, her husband and a psychiatrist, and their children. If that is Fitzgerald's point it really hits home because this book at the very least reflects his own personal problems with his beloved wife Zelda when she went over the edge. As for the rest of the story line this is a typical Fitzgerald Jazz Age story, well written, but with no necessity to empathize with the plight of the other denizens of the story.

If anyone ever paid close attention to the old literary dictum, "write what you know", it must have been F. Scott Fitzgerald. His novels bear a striking resemblance to his own life. TENDER IS THE NIGHT does not qualify as an exception---it contains alcoholism, mental illness, and the post WW I, Jazz Age American youth scene in Europe; the Riviera, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, central themes in the legend of Fitzgerald himself. Not having read or heard much about this novel beforehand, at first I felt I was reading a second-rate "Hangin' with the Homies over There in Frantz" or maybe "Rosemary Crashes the In-Crowd". As the novel unfolded, though, I began to appreciate its wider vision and deeper concerns. By the end, I felt that here was another chapter of the Great American Novel, a single version of which may never exist and maybe cannot possibly exist, but which may be perceived as several books that comprise the Great American Story when taken as one. If the rise from poverty to wealth and power is one strand of the `American story', then surely the descent from wealth and respectability to the lower depths is another. While Dick Diver's crash is not as complete as Hurstwood's in "Sister Carrie", he certainly winds up expelled from the Promised Land, [barred from his former social world] practicing medicine in ever smaller New York towns, his European days of glory long disappeared.

Fitzgerald is able to paint a slowly-revealed picture of talent and wit being worn down and defeated. The forces that accomplish this are subtle and not easily named. Dick, the rising young star of psychoanalysis, marries a beautiful patient who suffers from childhood abuse by her own father. She is extremely wealthy to boot. Together they form the core of a shining group of wealthy but rather aimless expatriates in those halcyon days of the dollar after World War I. Great things are expected from Dick, but ever-increasing alcohol and dissipation rob him of his career. He pours his energy into caring for and curing Nicole, his wife. Slowly, dependence on her wealth, living the life of a sybarite, and his decreasing attention to work turn the tables. She becomes the strong one; he begins to decline, has inconclusive affairs, ends up losing everything including Nicole. The sense of loss is palpable. "Her eyes followed his figure until it became a dot and mingled with the other dots in the summer crowd." A number of interesting minor characters and excellent description of life at that time, in those places, of that class, bring the novel to an extremely high level, along with Fitzgerald's mastery of dialogue that reflects the times perfectly. TENDER IS THE NIGHT is not only a great novel, it is an unforgettable portrait of an era that has completely vanished, yet which, with the help of movies, we still feel almost able to touch.

I thought I had reached the high point of Fitzgerald's work when I read The Great Gatsby. I was wrong. This book is not as organized nor as focused as Fitzgerald's more popular work, but, in my opinion, it is better. The characters are astoundingly complex, and are fascinating to read about and get to know. The setting--various places in Europe--is brilliantly depicted. But what makes this book great is the interaction between the characters. It is a story of the Divers, Dick and Nicole, a couple who all but trade roles in the course of the novel. The story opens with Rosemary, a young actress, as she meets the Divers and is completely enthralled by them. Through Rosemary we see that the Divers are, in fact, very nearly the ideal couple at the beginning of the book; but this apparent bliss is a mask of a deep, complex, and difficult history, and an awful foreshadowing of a tragedy to come. The story moves backward to Dick and Nicole's meeting, then forward again to the tragic climax.
Dick, a psychiatrist, met Nicole at his clinic, where she was a patient. He was a brilliant young doctor and successful author, she, a broken and troubled youth. Dick helped her put the pieces back together, and married her. They lived an almost blissful existence for a time, but then Nicole began to relapse. The bulk of the novel deals with Nicole's problems and her struggle to overcome them, as well as Dick's growing problems, which he, with all his training, is not so able to move past. Dick and Nicole's relationship develops into something ugly, a shattered remnant of its past glory. And what is worse, it isn't even really Nicole's fault.
Fitzgerald has a gift for beautiful prose and a talent for storytelling that is almost unparalleled in literature. This book should be considered a classic, and surely deserved to emerge from the shadow of its sister work, The Great Gatsby, and be regarded as the masterpiece that it is.

Written in the 1930's after Fitzgerald's wife had suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized in Zurich, this book about a young aspiring psychiatrist and a young beautiful patient whose relationship commences in a Zurich sanitarium -- a story which eerily rings of Fitgerald's portentous relationship with his wife, Zelda.

The up-and-down relationship of the Divers resembles the Swiss mountain's furnicular - the cable car which has the ascending car counterbalance the descending car. As Dick Diver's character descends from a glorious future to an alcoholic future, his wife's (Nicole) character ascends from insanity to normalcy. By 40, Dick Diver is a ruined man. At 44, Fitzgerald died after having never returned to the heights of "Gatsby" and "Tender" -- which were amazingly finished in his 20's and 30's.

How autobiographical this depressing tale is may never be fully known. But, it definitely recites many of the realties which he and his European expatriate hob nobbers assuredly lived. The most troublesome events being Dick Diver's descent to alcoholism, something which personally plagued Fitzgerald and which equally plagues the easily loved Diver. Only when he drinks does his tongue spew venomously, and unfortunately too often to those closest and fondest of him.

What I love most about Fitzgerald is that pretension belies the characters, not his writing. He hides no hard-to-read symbols within his text. He is a master story teller, who infuses rich dialogue with the magnificent story to make his writing great -- 70 years later.

This is a classic novel written by a classic novelist.

I'm not entirely certain even Fitzgerald quite knew the point of this mess, unless it was to convey the moral "Never marry a mental patient you're treating", which is really kind of the thing that's so obvious it doesn't need 300 pages to explain.

Women are vampires - or maybe they're not. And men are so noble that trying to carry the burden of the world on their shoulders crushes them - or maybe they're not, and it doesn't. Honestly, by the end I didn't particularly care, and the chances are good you won't either.

Mr. Diver, you're no Jay Gatsby. I'm going back to West Egg, where the real party is.

Tender Is the Night is one of the most interesting examples in 20th century fiction of reversing the usual social metaphors. Dr. Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, is examined as a case of mental health. He is also placed in a classic woman's role, that of the desired, amiable beauty sought after by all and sundry. These juxtapositions of the usual social perspectives allow the reader to touch closer to the realities of human need and connection, by piercing our assumptions about what is "right and proper."
The story begins from the perspective of Rosemary Hoyt, an 18-year-old motion picture star, recuperating on the Rivera. One day she goes to the beach and becomes entranced by the Divers, Dick and Nicole, a golden couple with whom she immediately falls in love. Beautiful, young, rich, and looking for adventure, she quickly sets out to capture Dick who is the most wonderful person she has ever met.
Later, the story shifts to Dick's perspective and traces back to the beginnings of his marriage to Nicole. She had formed an accidental attachment to him (a classic psychiatric transference) while residing in a mental hospital. He returned her friendship, and found it impossible to break her heart. They married, and he played the role of at-home psychiatrist tending her schizophrenia. All went well for years, but gradually he became weary of his role. His weariness causes him to re-evaluate his views on life . . . and the psychological profile of Dr. Diver, charming bon vivant, begins.
The tale is a remarkably modern one, even if it was set in the 1920s. Fitzgerald deeply investigates the meanings of love, humanity, and connection. In so doing, he uncovers some of the strongest and most vile of human passions, and makes fundamental commentaries about the futility of fighting against human nature. The result is a particularly bleak view of life, in which the tenders may end up more injured by life than those they tend. What good is it to please everyone else, if they offend rather than please you instead?
The character portrayals of Rosemary Hoyt, Dick Diver, and Nicole Diver are remarkably finely drawn. I can remember no other book where three such interesting characters are so well developed. You will feel like each of them is an old friend by the time the novel ends.
If you have ever had the chance to read Freud, the novel will remind you of his writings. There is the same fine literary hand, the succinctness and clarity of expression, and the remorseless directness of looking straight at the unpleasant. I felt like I was reading Freud rather than Fitzgerald in many sections.
This book should open up your mind to thinking about which social conventions you observe that leave you uncomfortable . . . or which are in contradiction to your own nature. Having surfaced those misfitting parts of your life, I suggest that you consider how you could shift your observation of conventions to make them more meaningful and emotionally rewarding for you.
Be considerate because it pleases you to be, not as a ruse to obtain love!

I twice tried to get into this book as i was reading it in paperback. F Scott is one of my favorite authors, but until I got the audio CD version of this I could not get into it/through it. The narrator in the book is wonderful -- one of the best I have heard on audio cd's -- and I don't think without his excellent reading and characterizations I would have finished the book. The book is slow to start -- it is in 3 parts -- and until Part 2 not much of it will make sense. Then it all starts to come together. If you can stick with the book til Part 2 you will be rewarded. Remember this is not written on the 4th grade level like so many books are written these days so you will have to work harder to read it. I just kept remembering the sense of time and place in history that F Scott wrote and it propelled me on.

At the opening of Tender Is the Night, the reader encounters Dr. Dick Diver on the French Riviera, surrounded by fashionable and wealthy admirers. Diver is terribly attractive and charismatic, but there are signs of trouble. Some type of scene at the Diver's home - we don't know what - leads to a duel, and the Divers decamp for Paris. There, Diver enters into a serious flirtation with a young actress, and the instability of his wife, Nicole, is revealed. Diver's father dies, and this loss seems to loosen some restraint in him. He begins a long debauch and ultimately he is diminished while Nicole is strengthened.

This book explores some themes found in other Fitzgerald novels. Most prominently, it examines the need for people who are superficially attractive and intelligent - people who "have it all" - to base their lives on something more substantial than the approval of others. It examines the role that alcohol can play in a personal collapse. And it examines the nature of emotional damage:

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."

This is a sad book, but it is beautifully written and the settings - in Switzerland and France between the two world wars - add interest.

F. S. Fitzgerald used a Rupert Brooke verse and an Oscar Wilde line as the epigraph of his first published novel "This Side of Paradise". The verse says that in this side of paradise, the wise can find little comfort. In his novel, he'll try expose how the wise ones feel lonely and lost in this side of paradise.

The `wise one' is Amory Blaine, a wealthy young man who goes to Princeton and discoveries that life is a little different from what he was told. Before that, he has a wonderful and extravagant life with his mother Beatrice. She loves her only son that for some readers it can be a little disturbing. By the way, by using such names (Amory from `amor' [love]) and Beatrice (Dante's muse), Fitzgerald shows what he is talking about here. He wants to explore the European tradition of love (found and lost) and the importance of love in the life of the protagonist in his growing process.

The story is told by an outside narrator who is always adding things from Amory's point of view -- this third person narrator even knows the character's thoughts. Less than making the thread of the story, Fitzgerald prefers to draw sketches of Amory's life. In this fashion, the novel is more a character study of Amory, telling the most important moments that would help the reader to understand the character's quest to find this place in the world.

Much of what Fitzgerald used to create "This Side of Paradise" and its characters comes from his own experience. Many critics have found much of the author in Amory Blaine. This technique of semi-autobiographical novel was often used by Fitzgerald throughout his career -- and it was largely criticized.

But "This other side of paradise" found more acclamation and was his most commercially successful novel. In this book, Fitzgerald was able to capture a period of American history virtually like no one else, and gave a candid portrait of a new youth culture. Not only was he able to described the glamour of the period, but he also made critical commentaries on its flaws.

Fitzgerald's fiction about the rich is written from the vantage point of one who is romantically, maybe neurotically, obsessed with them and articulates it so well. His writing, pulsating with the restless and reckless rhythms of the Jazz Age, finds its strength in empathy, its uncanny ability to describe emotions with clever, original metaphors. You find yourself pitying the problems of these perfectly created characters, but you'd still like to be one of them.
"Tender is the Night" turns our attention to several American expatriates who live, work, and play in the French Riviera and various fashionable locations around Europe in the 1920's. At the center of the novel are an affluent young couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, whose marriage has been built on a shaky foundation. Dick is a prominent psychiatrist of modest means who met Nicole when she was a patient under his care in a Swiss sanitarium. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Nicole is still dangerously capricious and fragile. She is the daughter of a fabulously wealthy American man with a dirty secret, and she has a frigid, highly protective older sister called Baby who attempts to be the stabilizing factor in the Divers' lives. Dick and Nicole have two children whose infrequent mention is indicative of their relatively low level of love for them.
One day on the beach at the Riviera, a young American movie actress named Rosemary Hoyt almost literally swims into the Divers' lives and quickly falls in love with Dick. Her mother encourages the affair, thinking Rosemary needs such risque life experiences to stimulate her passion. Nicole also has an extramarital affair with a magnetic playboy named Tommy Barban. By the end of the book, it is disheartening to see that Dick has to pay the price for both of their infidelities and Nicole, although "cured" to the point that she no longer needs his help, is still spoiled and frivolous. (That the rich can render themselves impervious to misfortunes and go on with their carefree lives, leaving the less fortunate to pick up the pieces, was also a major theme in "The Great Gatsby.")
The scenes play out against a picturesque European backdrop populated by a host of interesting characters, including the flighty Abe and Mary North, the awkward McKiscos, the haughty Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, who gets her comeuppance most satisfactorily, and Collis Clay, a likeable collegiate fellow who hangs around Rosemary and seems to have wandered way outside his cultural element.
This novel, the last Fitzgerald completed, reinforces his position as perhaps the greatest American prose stylist. His writing is like literary ambrosia; it bathes the tired, gray world in vibrant color and leaves it basking in a rosy hue. The experience of reading it is similar to that of listening to the most brilliant, sublime music ever composed or eating the most delicious food ever prepared -- something to be savored once in a long while if only to remind ourselves how good things can be.

North America escaped the wave of Nihilism that beleaguered Europe after the Great War. Although escaping the horrendous casualty lists of the European nations, Americans aped Continental disillusionment with their own, anaemic version, of it. Retaining greater resources, America's wealthy survivors returned to Europe, filled with cynicism and indifference. Few books have caught the attitudes of interwar Americans as vividly as this one. It is a Judas kiss in depicting America's social values of the time. Few could enjoy the life he describes, yet all aspired to it. Fitzgerald caught and portrayed the segment of that society most people seem to remember. It's a limited view, but tightly focussed.
Richard Diver, married to what was then termed a "neurotic" woman, encounters a young movie star. Films were still silent and actresses were chosen for their physical appeal. Rosemary, although still a teen-ager, fills the image perfectly. Immature, notorious and vivacious, she sets her sights on Diver. Encouraged by her mother, although the motivation for this remains unclear, Rosemary applies her wiles on a man twice her age.
As the two encounter, separate and meet again, they interact with members of the expatriate community in France. Fitzgerald portrays most of them through the couple's viewpoint. The depictions are compelling and evocative, but there isn't an appealling one in the lot. Diver's role in the new [then] Freudian psychology gives Fitzgerald a mechanism for exploring the human psyche. The dismemberment of Freud's analysis by modern studies doesn't detract from Fitzgerald's descriptive prowess. Even from this distance in time he's remains a writer to turn to and reflect on. He's deservedly acclaimed as one of the "greats" of the twenties.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

I missed this one back in college, where I became enamoured of much more sophisticated writers (Joyce and Hemingway, though some here may question this characterization of Hemingway at least). Indeed, I had liked THE GREAT GATSBY back then but was not overly fond of the Fitzgerald opus of short stories so, on balance, I never felt motivated to read any further into his works. And yet I recently found a copy of this one so, having a little time on my hands, set out to read it. At first it was slow going and very dated in its feel. Hard to relate to the early twentieth century upper class snobbery which seems to suffuse the book and, indeed, Fitzgerald's very sensibility. Hard, too, to relate to a bunch of sophomoric college boys roaming the streets, arm in arm, singing silly little college songs and angling to outshine one another by securing a better reputation among their peers and better connections with the "in groups." And yet, perhaps it was just a simpler time for, in truth, people are not entirely unlike that today though they are, I think, less transparent about it and more sophisticated in their areas of concern. Nevertheless, once past the first superficial ramblings of this book, I began to get sucked into the mind and world of Amory Blaine (presumably the alter ego of Fitzgerald himself). Although he remained a rather superficial and tiresome personality to the end, he was also an interesting soul and one whose travails, such as they were, could and did draw a reader in. I found Blaine's coming of age tale oddly enlightening, if only because I began to see the world as it was, roughly a hundred years ago, in a sharper, almost first-hand perspective. Blaine grows a bit though he never outgrows his essential self-absorption. But the loss of family and friends and lovers take their toll on his psyche and the Blaine we have at the end of the tale is a wiser and bigger boy than the one at the beginning. I think, in general, our serious writers in the twentieth century forgot about telling stories or creating worlds in favor of word-play and self-revelation and that this has done literature no service. Fitzgerald certainly was among those who took writing in that direction. But he sure could write and the fact that the very thin and sophomoric tale of Blaine's coming of age could hold me at the dawn of the twenty-first century is testimony to that. There are better and stronger books out there and some I much prefer. But the man could write. -- SWM

Few would argue against including "This Side of Paradise" on the required reading list for students of American fiction. It's F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, which provides both a taste of how great Fitzgerald would become as an iconic American writer, and also an autobiographical glimpse into his life at the turn of the century. The protagonist of the story is Amory Blaine, an aspiring young writer who comes of age at Princeton during the First World War. Amory struggles to find his place among his peers and within society. The story flows very smoothly, but with a few fits and starts during the middle chapters.

It's clear that Fitzgerald also struggled to complete this book. Satisfying himself didn't come easily, nor was it easy for him to satisfy his editors. The end result is very readable and highly enjoyable. The play which appears mid-way through the novel is a little strange, but it doesn't take away from the development of the plot.

I also recommend reading the book's preface for its interesting analysis of Fitzgerald's early years, and its discussion of the book's background and genesis.

I've been intending to read this book for a long time, having a memory of what was probably a 1980s BBC TV adaptation of it and having seen a play about the life of Zelda Fitzgerald on the Edinburgh Fringe in the '90s. Finally I got around to it...

It's impossible for me to comment meaningfully on 'Tender is the Night' without giving away the plot. Obviously it's a very well-written, literary work but about half-way through I had issues with the respect in which the narrative feels very much like masculine self-indulgence, what with Rosemary's abiding obsession with Dick and the incest that we are informed to have been the root of Nicole's mental disturbance being glossed over so glibly.

However, my feelings changed later on. I think the truly great human observation that Fitzgerald makes in this book is that when Dick & Rosemary's relationship is finally consummated, the mutual attraction is instantly killed off and the incident spells the beginning of the personal and professional demise of Dick.

Furthermore, the facts that the novel ends with Nicole herself straying into an adulterous relationship and a final shift towards a focus on her feelings about her marriage to Dick and her own life and identity, redeemed the story from being one seemingly intended to bolster male egos.

It's easy to lose sight of just how long ago 'Tender is the Night' was written because it tackles the question of the viability of monogamy in such a head-on, modern way. So I would recommend it, not only as a literary work of beauty that evokes the long-lost 'Jazz Age' but also and moreover as a book that examines the fundamental and perpetuating question of the nature of romantic love and the value we place upon it.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald gives here a masterpiece. The building of the conscience of a young American man is explored in the finest and most intricate details through his training in a prep school and at Princeton. His influences from all kinds of writers and poets are also examined in the way they interlace one another into a very subtle and complex whole.

This leads that young man to the experience of the First World War and what follows and he moves from what could be considered as a pose to a more conscious state of mind in which the social reality of his time becomes pregnant with meaning.

That leads him to a socialist stand coming from his dissatisfaction with the establishment that does not propose reforms and change but is self-satisfied in its achievements.

The second level of the novel is the sentimental pilgrimage that the hero follows from the sheer discovery of love play to the deepest passion that leads nowhere and is finally identified by him as nothing but a negation of his self in the titillation of his egotism.

Love is nothing but a mirror of himself and there is none of the two-way altruism that builds real love as a dual-carriageway of emotions and personal involvement.

Hence he moves from a pure egotistic personality to something that is identified as a personage that is able to take into account the outside world as a living being of itself.

The final element of interest in this book is the way Catholicism is an inspiration on that road and that his final starting point as an altruistic socialist is nothing but the development of Christian love that does not exist if the other is not one's equal, no matter where this other stands in the social order.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels are a one trick pony in the sense that he writes about the same time period (the 1920's), the same kind of people (rich or successful Americans) and protagonists who suffer the same fate (men whose ultimate failures are the result of their own shortcomings and the influence of women). His works are also highly autobiographical. Thus to read Fitzgerald with understanding one should start at the beginning (This Side of Paradise), move to the full bloom of his talent (The Great Gatsby) and culminate at the end (Tender is the Night). It would help to read a good biography along the way. The other option is to just read Gatsby which is one of the finest American novels ever written.

This Side of Paradise is his first novel and here we see both the promise of the character, Amory Blaine, and the author. On the very first page of the novel Fitzgerald displays his talent for words in his description of Amory's mother: "All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all the arts and traditions barren of all ideas in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud." This lengthy sentence, despite its seeming awkwardness, tells us all we need to know about Beatrice and suggests that the son will share the same qualities. Other examples of Fitzgerald's facility with words follow. On page 45 he describes Isabelle thusly: "She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed to divers on springboards, leading ladies on opening nights, and lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a discordant blend of themes from `Thais' and `Carmen.' She had never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it. She has been sixteen years old for six months." And on page 47 is Isabelle's description of Amory: "she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement slenderness." Only Fitzgerald could come up with such vivid and evocative descriptions.

One fault of the book is that it is too episodic without clear transitions. First Amory is a child, then a student at Princeton, then a soldier (although we really do not see this part of this life and it seems to have not affected him), then a lover of Rosalind, then at loose ends, then has a relationship with Eleanor, then the book ends with Amory alone in the world and spouting socialist maxims. It is hard to picture this individual, who for 200 pages has been totally absorbed with himself, suddenly developing a social conscience!

Another problem I have is that Fitzgerald tries too hard to show his education. The book is full of poetry and literary references. It is written much as a college student would write a paper to try to impress the professor and thus get a high grade, rather than in a manner that is appropriate to the telling of a story. Fitzgerald is, of course, at this point in his life not far removed from Princeton and perhaps is still writing as a college student.

In the end, then, we should read This Side of Paradise for the beauty of the language and not be overly concerned with the story line and characters.

I was very disappointed by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel. I found the story tedious and the characters tiresome. Reading through to the end was a chore. I wanted to throw the book in the trashcan.

There are many problems. At the top of the list is Fitzgerald’s main character, a psychiatrist named Dick Diver who marries one of his own patients. I found this unrealistic, like many other facets of the story. It certainly did not endear me to the protagonist. As a reader I had no sympathy for Diver, a obstacle which the author might easily have avoided by casting the story differently. Nor was I convinced by Diver’s psychiatric practice.

An author should write about what he knows. Fitzgerald obviously was writing about his wife’s mental issues which he knew very well. Fine. But his knowledge of the field of psychiatry and/or clinical psychology was not deep enough to bring off the story in a credible manner. A fictional story must be realistic to be believable.

The grander setting is the Parisian Lost Generation of the 1920s, the theme of people leading vacuous lives of quiet desperation, much the same as the backdrop for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. However, in my opinion Hemingway did a more convincing job in his great novel, in part because he kept the proper distance from his characters. There are times in Tender in the Night when Fitzgerald interjects pearls of supposed wisdom, puts words in the mouths of his characters that clearly reflect his own views about the world, how things are, life, the nature of women, etc. So much better to let the lost souls be what they are, lost, and leave it at that. Distance.

Tender is the Night was written over a decade, and it shows. Characters grow, stop, we fast forward, and they change and mature without transition. Tempting is the correlations between Fitzgerald's companionship with mentally unhinged Zelda and Dick Diver's nurturing husband/psychotherapist to Nicole, an heiress and ex-schizoid in occasional relapse who was traumatized by her father at a tender age.
Tender is Dick's caressing but scientific approach to loving Nicole. When Rosemary Hoyt, a young starlet-to-be, pursues Dick with all due diligence, Dick loses the cool stability of his marriage experiment for the exciting, verily unscientific, if affected, opportunity to feel something new. Having committed himself to Nicole's love and care despite his better reason, Dick lives with the consequences he signed on to live with. His wife, recovering from her deep, despairing mental illness, sucks the life out of Dick, gaining strength with each drop of vigor he loses, fully aware of his inevitable failure.
Tender is the Night, where Fitzgerald starts to show the influence of Hollywood (not incidental, the Rosemary character, ey?) on his narrative composition, feels like a cast of actors playing their roles with converse dramatic irony. Nicole's and Dick's anticipation of the paths they are on, curves, divergences and all, perhaps account for the absence of dramatic tension and suspense in Tender is the Night. It is, instead, a journal of selected scenes catching the moods and musings of a doomed marriage, often striking poignancy at a perfect pitch.

I wonder why this was so unpopular, as reflected by sales after its first publication. It's a tragic depressive book, true, but then so were 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Beautiful and Damned'. It features the same bright and beautiful people who, through fatal flaws in their characters, fall through the cracks and never clamber up. This is the only one of the novels, though, that focuses on Americans out of America - rich expatriates in Europe. It's rather Hemingway-ish, except that of course instead of bull-fighting and big-game-hunting they go to beaches and do a lot of shopping. :)
It is true, however, that this book is generally darker and grimmer than the others. The others started off with hope and excitement and wonder. Except for the first section, this is not the case here. Even when we view events through Rosemary's eyes, we are always aware and disturbed that things are not as they seem and people are falling apart. The prose is more muted, too - less of the lovingly lyrical imagery of TBAD, fewer descriptions of the wealth and opulence of TGG. There is a sense of concealed decay throughout this novel.
This has a lot of disturbing undercurrents under its bright and polished surface. The events of the novel, in fact, reflect the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver themselves (Nicole more obviously, with her schizophrenia). Perhaps there isn't the same sense of optimism and idealism that one senses from the protagonists in the other books - Amory Blaine in 'This Side of Paradise'; Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert in TBAD; Jay Gatsby, however deluded he is in his case, in TGG; even what's-his-name? in The Love of the Last Tycoon. The first fifth of the book shows Dick and Nicole young, but henceforth they are tired and jaded and struggling desperately to keep up appearances. Rosemary Hoyt is likeable when she first appears, but by the last two sections she is hopelessly corrupted as well. The characters all seem particularly depraved; or perhaps amoral. This is clearly exhibited through their adultery. Yet Anthony Patch had an affair as well; and Jay Gatsby was intent on breaking up a secure marriage.
Another aspect of it might have to do with the fall. Anthony and Gloria were played out by fate. He was the heir to a large fortune and he lost it due to a moment's folly. His error was constructed on a foundation of weakness and ignorance, true, but circumstances play a part. For Gatsby, one can't possibly blame him for not doing enough - if anything, it was that his vision was flawed in the first place and so whatever he did couldn't possibly have achieved him his desire. The reader feels sympathy for him. Yet Dick and Nicole don't have that luxury of blaming things on fate. They have money, they have attainable dreams, they have beauty and power. They foul it all up with no help from anyone else. To a certain extent the reader recoils from such characters.
Fitzgerald appears to have pinned Dick's fall on his need for approval, attention and affection - which fits quite well. It would explain why he married Nicole, who needed him so badly; why he chased after other women, to ascertain to himself that he was still attractive and desirable. Nicole is tougher. I get the impression Fitzgerald uses her schizophrenia as a cover for a lot of things, a one-size-fits-all explanation. Why is she like that? Oh, she's crazy. Why did she do that? Oh, she's crazy.
So what have we looked at? Theme - grimmer, but similar to other books. Characters - less likeable perhaps, but overall still similar. Setting - I can't see that it makes much of a difference. Timing plays a part too, of course. This book came out in the aftermath of the Great Depression, after the Jazz Age had blown past. People didn't want to be reminded of the glitzy parties of a past they couldn't return to; they were focused on hard work, picking up the pieces, moving forward in a steadier saner world. Poor Fitzgerald - he couldn't have helped that, after all.

Despite its sombre tone, I really enjoyed reading Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. At first, it appears that the novel will follow Rosemary Hoyt, a young American actress traveling abroad with her mother. Rosemary meets Dick and Nicole Diver, a young, affluent couple, on a beach in France, during her travels. She soon finds herself falling in love with Mr. Diver.

From there, however, the story takes an abrupt turn. We learn the history of the Diver couple. Dick is a psychoanalytic doctor, and his relationship with Nicole began as a clinical one. An impossibly rich young girl from America, she'd been committed to a mental facility in Europe after a disastrous turn in her relationship with her father. Dick happens upon her one day in the facility grounds, and the two begin talking and writing to one another. Later, Dick almost seems compelled to marry her in order to fully cure her of her illness.

At any rate, the remainder of the tale primarily follows Dick and Nicole (with brief re-appearances by Rosemary) as their marriage evolves and eventually disintegrates. It is a sad tale, indeed, and it definitely smacks of Fitzgerald's fascinations with social power and money. It also sadly rings with autobiographical elements in Fitzgerald's later life - adultery, mental illness, the feeling of failed potential.

The new movie with Leonardo di Caprio is very close to the the plot of the book; the book lives of the used language though. Phrases like something is "quivering on the horizon" instead of "about to happen" are making this a great book of the English language. Furthermore the destructive character of Gatsby's love is clearer reading the book than watching the movie. That said if you want to know what the book is about just watch the movie. If you love elaborate sentences and some more depth of the characters then read the book.

The quality of the book itself is typical Easton Press standard and makes a great addition to any bookshelf.

This Side of Paradise is a paean to that special period in a young man's life when he forges the principles, flirts with his talents, find and loses love.
Fitzgerald's story is a bit more convoluted as he nurtures his hero from strangeness of childhood (a Portrait of the American Artist, to some extent), through the vanity of teens, through the confusion of college. He captures some of the ubiquitous sensations of being a college student - of the effervescent but ephemeral experience that feels like it will last forever; of friendships, and the general experimentation of finding and losing.
The book is also notable for a protofeminist (albeit from a male perspective) subtext that seems to play out in the background. When women enter into Emory Blaine's Life, it is as if the narrator yields the floor to the object of his affections so that she can write her own part, and by providing differentiation and individuation for the female characters, Fitzgerald validates them as living, breathing, self-willing entities.
By its end, This Side of Paradise seems like an incomplete story whose only outcome is melancholy. It is the gateway to FSF's biggest works, as the pathos of graduation from college leads to our most consequential decisions and ambitious acttions. Yet something is missing - the carefree, unadulterated moments of certainty that we will do something great, that the world is great, and that anything is possible as long as we don't attempt it.

"Tender is the Night" is obviously a more complex novel than "The Great Gatsby" and more difficult to read. I picked this book up twice. The first time I gave up after reading only half. The second time I got bogged down then hopped onto the store.com to read the customer reviews. Here someone wrote that you should spend sufficient time with the novel and read it with careful concentration. That was good advice indeed, because the novel then rolled along and became a pleasure to read once I gave it sufficient attention.
The first part of the novel is a little annoying. The unmarried Rosemary pursues the married Dick Diver with complicity from her mother. Why would her mother encourage her daughter to get involved with a married man? That part I found frustrating.
I was also confused as to what motivated Dick to marry Nicole. Some characters in the novel said it was money. One reviewer here at the store.com, whose opinion seems learned, says he did so out of pity for her schizophrenic state. The novel circles back from the beaches of Cannes and streets of Paris to the mountain hospital where the two characters first met. At first I found myself backing up and rereading parts of this because the change in venue was so abrupt that it left me somewhat lost. It was a major shift from the breezy momentum of the early chapters. But this part of the novel is where the real drama in the story begins to unfold. So it was a necessary detour.
Other reviewers have noted that this novel varies in style from Fitzgerald's other novels. I read "The Great Gatsby" for the second time in one sitting. That novel is more lyrical and rolls along more easily than this one. There are certain sentences here in "Tender is the Night" that I wondered how they escaped the careful editing of Maxwell Perkins (editor at Charles Scriber and Sons).
Finally fans of Fitzgerald who long to read about rich American expatriates living in Europe will find plenty to entertain them here. The scenery is the beaches of Cannes, the streets of Paris, and the spas of France. Nicole and Dick Divers go from one gathering of glitterati to the next. Fitzgerald drops you squarely into the lives of the idle rich as he did in "The Great Gatsby". But here he also reveals a lot about their miseries and heir drunkenness. Maybe that is the chief difference between the two novels (if you ignore that crimes in Gatsby).

After finishing this book I was reminded of a beautiful grand house - if you take it in its entirety, you can't help but admire it. Within, there may be some rooms that leave something to be desired, but the overall effect is breathtaking. So it is with this book. Fitzgerald manages to write a story about a relationship that manages to be acerbicand tender at the same time. Like the other traditional inheritor of the `Great American Novelist' title, Hemmingway. Fitzgerald combines a genius for writing wonderful character insights with great `background painting' - some of his descriptions of settings are truly masterpieces. Even the `extras' - they don't have anything to do with the story so it is hard to call them characters - get wonderfully drawn descriptions. I feel that this book truly captures its age and place.
And the added bonus - this is a wonderful insight into a relationship built on the worst of foundations slowly but surely heading to its end, told to us from various viewpoints. I don't know much about Fitzgerald's life, but if this is semi-autobiographical as literary critics say, you have to feel sorry for all that were involved in the real life events. Dick and Nicole are really caricatures of the Americans of their generation that lived the high life in Europe, and yet could never quite put their finger on what is was that they were actually meant to be doing.

This Side Of Paradise is absolutely one of the finest pieces of literature of its time. I liked it better than Fitzgerald's most popular classic The Great Gatsby. And I think J.D. Salinger was influenced by this novel when he wrote The Catcher In The Rye because there are so many parallels that it just seems obvious. I always laugh when I see or hear people listing their favorite novel is The Catcher In The Rye because I thought This Side Of Paradise was so similar but way better and written decades before. Amory Blaine is an interesting character and I enjoyed every minute of this book. It's been probably 20+ years since I read it but I remember not being able to put it down. The same for one of my other favorite novels, East Of Eden by John Steinbeck. Anyway, if you are a fan of Salinger, then give this novel a chance- it's so worth it!

F. Scott Fitzgerald is an author that represents the 20s in the US, this period where everything was crazy and rich before the Great Depression. This novel is the story of a love affair and of a career, that of Doctor Dick Diver. He is promised to a bright future as a psychiatric doctor. He marries one of the richest heiresses of America who was a patient first of all and became his wife. This love affair is described in the smallest and tiniest details. But Dick Diver comes to the point where he needs to distanciate himself from this ex-neurotic if not schizophrenic wife who was raped by her own father. Dick Diver is also extremely sollicited by many women because he is handsome and charming. He has a short-lived affair with a young Hollywood actress, Rosemary. But his wife Nicole is absolutely dependent on her love for him and cannot survive without his love.
The story leads us among the circles of rich Americans and English people who mostly roams the highlighted areas of Europe, spending the money they have and that is always more than they can spend. But a breaking point builds up slowly and explodes sometime in 1927-28. He gets more and more aloof as for his job, if not frankly sloppy and finally gets out of it due to alcoholism. He gets also more and more distant from Nicole. But the real breaking point is when Nicole conquers her freedom through a liaison with another man. Then the end is inevitable : divorce and going back to America to have a general practitioner's office in the state of New York.
But the book is a lot more interesting than just this picture. It shows how the very rich are living a complete dream life with caprices, good manners and civility, but no touch with the real world and how they get so far from the real world that they have to develop some kind of a screen to be protected from the fall this distance may represent : alcoholism, an artificial lifestyle and environment, spending as a daily occupation. This is in full contradiction with working to earn a living, which Dick Diver is always doing and a collapse is always at hand and it finally happens. One cannot live the contradiction between a real professional life and an artificial lifestyle. What's more interesting is that the fall comes from this very artificial lifestyle. Alcoholism is a coping strategy that dooms a professional life. Good manners and nicely controled love affairs are also in contradiction with a family life (the doctor has two children) and a professional life. So one day it has to break.
Thus the night of the title has many meanings : the nightlife of this detached society, the shadow of all the little affairs and liaisons that remain unrealised or hardly realised, the night of the movie theater since the cinema is always in the background, the night of the end of a love affair, a passion, the night of a lost career. And Doctor Dick Diver submits to this gentle slope going down slowly, to this coming night as if it were a liberation from the obligations of this artificial life. He goes back to reality and gets lost in the night of the unknown, unknown at least for the members of this artificial society of over-rich kids who never grow up. Finally it is a style in the book : every detail is always draped in some kind of shadow, in some kind of night that helps any contradiction and evolution to exist and to survive any kind of crisis.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is the freshness of its language: except for a few slang words used in speech, the prose is so cutting and modern that it reads like a recent creation.
Much of the discussion surrounding this book has to do with its semi-autobiographical nature, at least to the extent the Divers' marriage and Dick's personal unraveling mirrors the effect Zelda's mental illness had on Fitzgerald. Yet knowing too much about the parallels between a writer's life and his work can be distracting, and this is a good enough story to stand on its own without recourse to voyeurism. Fitzgerald shows the effects of insanity on a marriage and on its (initially) stronger member, but is discreetly circumspect as regards his inner feelings. We can see Dick working to create a sphere of normalcy around Nicole, yet his motivation is not entirely clear. In fact, Dick Diver is ultimately the least fully explored of the bunch: we never really learn what makes Dick tick. Why does he have this compulsion to make himself liked, to briefly be the life of the party then move on before his charm wears thin? In this behavior Dick displays a restless sociopathy worthy of a Bret Easton Ellis character - which also, again, proves the essential freshness of this novel written a lifetime ago.

Other reviewers and critiques have pointed to Fitzgerald�s criticism of the Catholic church and his frustration with capitalism in �This Side of Paradise�. Yet there is another poignant theme�Fitzgerald�s frustration with women�that will resonate deeply with men who are currently dating.
Amory, the main character in the novel who is, of course, Fitzgerald himself, complains that women are quick to jettison real love for a man with real money. Moreover, he complains of those glittering beauties, their callousness toward men, and the heartbreak they cause.
Of one character he writes �She is one of those girls who never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness�intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty.�
The same character is said to ��[she] treats men terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces---and they come back for more�. Of course, as a male reader we know both of these ideas to be absolutely true of so many girls and men�s behavior too.
Writing of his broken relationships and his failure to find a proper muse, Fitzgerland writes �Women�of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts...were all removed by their very beauty, around which men swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.� The emotional upheaval from broken relations could be the cause of much writer�s block.
The careful reader need not walk away from this lyric prose a misogynist. Rather Fitzgerald�s first novel can be considered a primer on dating for the college-aged man or the divorcee recently reentering the dating market.

In “Tender Is the Night,” Fitzgerald provides us with a harsh look at human nature and relationships through the lives of three unforgettable characters. The story is told from these three different characters, the Divers, Dick and Nicole and Rosemary. The story shifts between the three persons to slowly reveal the surreal relationship between Dick and Nicole and their sad lives. “Tender Is the Night” is less dramatic and much slower than “The Great Gatsby,” but eventually much more satisfying. The characters are more alive, realistic and some scenes are truly haunting. It’s a sobering, harsh and disturbing look at human nature along with the downfall of a man into despair.

Like everything Fitzgerald wrote this has that burnished by the morning sun feel to it. Certainly there are real themes in it that make this a substantial first novel but the lasting appeal is that romanticism that Fitzgerald himself seemed to have created with his own hands. Forged in that prep school fire though that romanticism isn't made of the toughest stuff and perhaps since Scott never really had any difficulties along the way to becoming a young succesful novelist he was never really forced to become more than that, a young success. His great theme is romance itself, he brings it to everything from football to war to young ladies to writing, he just has the gift to touch and make golden. Not many people will be immune to the contagion of such a disease. Amory is the perfect name for this amourous and ardent young east coaster, a character who was immediately embraced with the publication of this book as the spokesmen for the new up and coming generation, not yet named the lost generation. This book was full of promise and that feeling was infectious and equally attractive was the rather free libertine approach to sex. With Fitzgerald the twenties were born. Amory's affairs are just that, his romances mere flirtations, but he has the ability to make all seem of utter importance because all outcomes effect the state of our heros grace. An egotist, yes! But at that age, college age, what else is there to be. His egotism fuels his romantic ideas about life, and the fire builds and builds slow and burns as bright as life can burn in youth.....at least on this side of paradise.

Written when F. Scott was a mere 23 years of age, This Side of Paradise elevates itself as a seminal and ground-breaking semi-autobiographical novel that inexplicably remains vastly underappreciated as of today. Amory Blaine manifests himself as a veritable study of egotism, romanticism, idealism, and intense disillusionment. Amory proves to be an endearing and highly affable young protagonist. The prep school and Princeton years of supercilious and pretentious egotist hedonism abound immensely in energy, innocence, and vitality.
Through the despair of his failed love with Rosalind et al, his disenchantment with his advertsing job, and the inseparable gloom and despair of WWI, Amory enters into a reproachful state of disillusionment and cynicism subsequent to "The Great War". Fitzgerald, the acclaimed golden boy of his aptly named Jazz Age, emodies in Amory "a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."
Amory undergoes a catharsis of sorts in purging his tragic loss of innocence due to the war with his heavy drinking and nihilistic behavior. Nonetheless, he regains a semblance of his former confidence and intensity at the conclusion of the book, "yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul." Is Amory the same romantic egotist that we witnessed at the onset of this powerful work? Not by any stretch of the imagination. However, through his despondent adversity, his intellectualism survives as well as his somewhat frayed, yet repaired sense of hopeful idealisism for the future - whatever it may bring. A strikingly similar ending to Hemingway's later masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, n'est-ce pas?