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.
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