Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, 'Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?' and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.

When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Headlined as the leading book on the publisher's list and sure of a good send-off.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Not wholly satisfactory, in final analysis - but good reading. This is for a less serious audience - though not the college crowd that drank in his early books. The psychological aspects are neither so sound nor so interesting as the Bottome book. The selling point of this book is the story itself, the almost morbid fascination of the lurking mystery, the deft shift of atmosphere from the gay nonchalance of the Riviera sands, to the horrors of the tragedy in a Paris hotel, and the final, and rather unexpected denouement. The comparison with Private Worlds, which is inevitable, is not a sound one.

Against a background of the Riviera, of Paris, of Switzerland and a mental sanitarium, the drama is played out.

Again an author who has built up a more or less established market, and his non appearance (in book form) over a period of several years, has stimulated interest in this first full length work since the publication of The Great Gatsby.Ī story of a psychiatrist, and of his lovely wife - a marriage, on the surface ideally happy, but eaten underneath by the insecurity of its basis, and the coils that riches have placed around the husband.

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald