As I mentioned in my last blog entry about Fitzgerald, I’m waiting to read the book that really uses his apparent potential to the fullest. It wasn’t The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and, alas, it wasn’t Tender Is the Night either.
This is not to say it’s not a good book: it’s an excellent book. It’s just, well, not perfect. The most personal of all his novels, the story of a marriage failing due to fragile mental health on Nora’s part and personality development on Dick’s—this is complicated to explain, but I saw him as being at least equally at fault, considering his initial reasons for going into the marriage and his slow hardening into complacency as the well-off husband and not, anymore, up-and-coming psychiatrist—Tender Is the Night is well-written, with some, if not many, of Fitzgerald’s moments of shining prose (“She crossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins”), with well-rounded, sympathetic characters (Nora and Dick especially, but the cast of secondary characters, particularly the hangers-on and friends of Nora and Dick) is not easily forgotten either, and a plot that moves well enough, from the end of World War I to the end of a marriage. However, it’s also lacking a certain something—perhaps it’s too long, or perhaps it moves a tiny bit too slowly, or perhaps its being so personal prevented Fitzgerald from really explaining the characters or delving into their lives as he should have—but, whatever it was, it makes the novel slightly less than the perfect gem it should have been. So, instead of claiming a place on my bookshelf along with all the other classic works I enjoy and admire, this one will get given away, or perhaps just left behind, at the end of the year: another day, another Penguin Classic. So it goes.
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