Last month my book club tackled Tender is the Night and if you haven't ever read it, it's worth the effort.

In the summer of 1925 along the French Riviera, amid the flounce of flappers and smooth wail of jazz, a party of Americans and Europeans gather on the beach to lick their idle wounds. Hosts Dick Diver and his wife Nicole entertain old friends and garner new ones, their charm radiating to the edges of the group, illuminating all in their merry orbit. To this scene, Rosemary Hoyt arrives, fresh from the Hollywood success of her new movie, Daddy’s Girl. The presentation of her beauty, prestige and youth tilts the gathering – accentuating both their insecurities and her naivety. At 18 she naturally falls in love with the charismatic Dick, envying his social graces while woefully unaware of life’s realities.

For behind the shining wall of manners, all is not well.  Born into a wealthy family, Nicole lost her mother to illness at a young age and was left in the care of her father and sister. Unfortunately the bond of father and daughter which had been lovingly supportive turned sexual and nothing ever was the same in Nicole’s world.

 Dick, on the other hand, had grown up in rural New York, his father a clergyman, his mother of modest inherited means. He had excelled academically and eventually majored in psychiatry, ending up in European Freudian environs at a colleague’s clinic where he meets Nicole, a schizophrenic patient. Through a series of meetings and letters they become acquainted and drawn to each other – Nicole fascinated by his assurance and charm, he intrigued by her beauty and vulnerability. Despite much trepidation of friends and family, they marry and thus begin their golden arc of gaiety.

Fitzgerald splashes his canvas with color – physically and metaphorically. Through the soft, tropical breezes and champagne haze, his characters dance themselves in and out of each other’s lives, incongruously littering along the way a murdered Afro-American shoe- shine maker, an early morning duel at 40 paces where both men miss, several rounds of assaults and consequent bail requirements, a masquerade party, a speakeasy deadly beating and a trail of social bigotry.  All the while the participants rollick and play, assessing each other with the wily, searing dread that the measure of their lives is short.

Throughout their marriage, Dick’s interest in other women, particularly Rosemary, whether real or imagined, triggers episodes of ranting illness for Nicole and always there is a suppressed fear of complete collapse. Yet Dick somehow balms her way back to sanity. Their co- dependence volleys back and forth until suddenly the balance shifts and Nicole begins taking tentative steps to independence unsettling Dick, who consequently begins to assuage his new discomfort with alcohol. And thus the seesaw of wholeness tips the other way until finally we see Nicole in a shaft of sunlight and Dick merging into shadow. And all the other players “strut and fret their time upon the stage.”

Sometimes Fitzgerald strokes his golden people forcefully, sometimes with a feather’s touch. For below all that lovely wealth and dissipation beat hearts that break, heal, love, despise, envy, regret, and hope.

Rather like you and me.