Tender Reading

Currently Reading: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Side note: I promise I will make progress on A Clockwork Orange. I’m hoping that it will be one of my November blog posts, but that may have been more ambitious than I had anticipated. It seems it is a novel that is too challenging to begin on the metro – breaking one of my own rules. The fake slang is just really hard to get adjusted and re-adjusted to.

Moving on….

Confession: I actually completely forgot I had read Tender is the Night. I did have the nagging feeling for a while that I had read one more book over the summer than the ones I’ve already blogged about, but as no name or distinct reading memory came to me, I assumed that I was simply thinking of my failed attempt to read An Invisible Man (which is still on my list!). It wasn’t until I was discussing my reading project with a co-worker yesterday and she mentioned that Tender is the Night was on her reading list that I finally remembered that I had, in fact, read it and recently.

I believe the source of this literary amnesia is partly due to an inconsistent reading schedule with far too many breaks and distractions to absorb much of what I read. However, I firmly believe that the more important reason is that the takeaway from Tender is the Night has very little to do with plot and so much to do with the feeling the writing evokes in the reader.

To clarify, I should probably summarize the book a little bit. Full disclosure, I had to look up some summaries before writing this for a bit of a refresher as I could remember the characters and bits of plot, but large chunks of the storyline escaped me. Tender is the Night mainly focuses on the lives of three characters: Rosemary Hoyt, a beautiful, young, and rather sheltered new Hollywood actress, and Dick and Nicole Diver, a seemingly blissfully happy, successful, and charming couple whose marriage contains more tortured and twisted secrets and relationships than appear on the surface. Chief among these secrets are Nicole’s relapses into breakdowns brought on by mental illness she has battled since she was sixteen. The story begins when Rosemary meets the Divers while they are all vacationing in France and she promptly falls in love with Dick and becomes Nicole’s close friend. It then progresses to a flashback sequence that reveals the darker aspects of the Divers’ lives.

The reason I argue that the plot is secondary in this novel is that there are several events that would be massive incidents in other novels, that would stick with me more after reading it, that are basically glossed over in Tender is the Night. Someone is murdered, someone is molested by their father, someone drives her car off the road purposefully, and more than one character has an affair. Again, I barely remembered any of these plot points, plot points that would easily be described as exciting incidents in other novels. I mostly remembered one of the affairs and only because it had such a long build up and then was so anti-climatic when it happened. Instead of feeling any release or excitement or guilt or anything at giving in to his long-standing attraction, the character is almost numb. He's so defeated and broken that nothing can evoke emotions in him any more.

And this emotion was so prevailing throughout the novel, that that's what lingered after I finished reading it. The story didn’t matter. What mattered was the devastating and bleak, yet bittersweet feeling with which it left you. The Divers’ story was especially heart wrenching to experience as both the caregiver and the cared for are so run down and tormented by their situation. Yet they are so in love with each other that breaking free of their dependence – while necessary for Nicole’s mental health – is excruciating even if it is liberating.

These were the powerful aspects of the novel. The “exciting incidents” were completely dwarfed by these overwhelming emotional journeys.

In refreshing my memory, I found information that made these emotions even more poignant for me. It turns out that this novel was much more autobiographical than I had realized. I knew that Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, had suffered a mental illness (schizophrenia), but I’d never really thought about how this must have influenced his life as well. I never knew how broken and defeated Fitzgerald was in the end of his life and how much he thought of himself as a failure. In reading Dick Diver’s story, I had a revealing look into the author’s life.

Which just makes this so much sadder.

Perhaps the real reason I forgot that I read this was self-preservation...