Tender Is the Night

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Narrated by: Therese Plummer

Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked-about books of the year. "It's amazing how excellent much of it is," Ernest Hemingway said to Maxwell Perkins. "I will say now," John O'Hara wrote Fitzgerald, "Tender Is the Night is in the early stages of being my favorite book, even more than This Side of Paradise." And Archibald MacLeish exclaimed: "Great God, Scott...You are a fine writer. Believe it - not me." Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character - lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative - Tender Is the Night, Mabel Dodge Luhan remarked, raised F. Scott Fitzgerald to the heights of a "modern Orpheus".

©1933, Charles Scribner's Sons (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Plummer's skill with varied voices and accents is without equal. She navigates Fitzgerald's glamorous world with panache, immersing the listener in the intense characters' personalities. The result is an entertaining production in which the narrative is as alive as the characters themselves." ( AudioFile)

Just Read The Book

The narrator became so obnoxious with all these different bad accents, I had to stop. It was just extremely distracting, and made it difficult to enjoy (or understand) Fitzgerald's work.

well worth it... enthralling, talented, narrator

loved it but would enjoy meeting the reader. I would enjoy hearing her read other books

Excellent novel about the choices a couple makes

Overall, a good performance of a compeling story of a troubled couple in the twenties. The narrator does a good job the varied accents of the international cast of characters with a major weakness of the strange accent she uses for the main character of Dick Diver.

A Moderately Worthy Effort

I keep being surprised at how much I like Fitzgerald. I never read him much while in school, and my taste tended more to the existential and European as I got older.

But lately I’ve been “cleaning up,” catching up on American literature from the early 20th century. And so recently I arrived here at Tender.

It’s got its weaknesses. Plot development is good, but not extraordinary. I’d say the same about character development. There are surprisingly good moments in the use of language, but there are some mediocre places, too.

The narration follows in the same spirit. The reader gets some of the characters down beautifully, especially women in moments of emotion and romance. In many other circumstances, and as to nuances in language, she can be really off.

I think 4 stars is right, if a bit generous. But, if you’re after experiencing this novel, I’d recommend it.

An Excellent If Somewhat Muddled Book

"Tender Is the Night" is perhaps the kind of book that grows on you with repeated reading/listening. Its individual parts, particularly Books I and II, work well in themselves. The language, as always with Scott Fitzgerald, has flashes of brilliance. One comes to empathize with Dr. Dick Driver, and, eventually, with his wife, Nicole, even if one never comes to genuinely like them. Still, the fragmented structure of the book can make it hard to follow, especially on first take (Fitzgerald himself was aware of the problem and considered re-editing the book chronologically, an approach later adopted by the BBC in its mini-series based on the book). This is even more an issue when listening to an audiobook, where a quick backtrack is no easy thing. The performance is fine, though several of the characters become essentially indistinguishable.