Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities

"More and more critics acknowledge that Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is not, to borrow a cliché from the music industry, a one-hit wonder.  In the last two decades especially, increasing numbers of readers have abandoned the condescension, tinged with a lingering but grudging admiration for the waning powers of a broken artist, with which earlier generations regarded Fitzgerald's other novels.  Messenger (emer., Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) singles out Tender Is the Night as Fitzgerald's "richest novel" while at the same time admitting and celebrating Fitzgerald's "running love affair and quarrel with sentiment."  Indeed, Messenger asserts that "Tender Is the Night is the psychological and sentimental key to all [Fitzgerald's] fiction," and he does so with erudite, exhaustive, and relentless authority.  Lest one imagine that Messenger's focus is too narrow, one need only consider the sheer range of his discussion, which incorporates topics as diverse as cubism, feminism, seduction, realism, incest, and Freudianism along with a surprisingly original consideration of Zelda-as-Nicole, all scrutinized under the lens of sentiment within the Fitzgerald corpus.  For Messenger, Fitzgerald's relationship to this frequently maligned literary trait reveals the genius of the author, not his weakness. Highly recommended."
—CHOICE

“Chris Messenger provides an absorbing, imaginative, and critically cognizant reading of Fitzgerald's great novel.”
—Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship and Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald

“‘Tender Is the Night’ and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Identities is an impressive, thorough, and exhaustive piece of scholarship that excavates an amazing amount of historical background from Fitzgerald’s fourth novel while adding immeasurably to our appreciation of its thematic texture.”
—Kirk Curnutt, author of The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Every decade of so a critical study on a literary text is published and resets the agenda for the decade that will follow it. Chris Messenger's intricate and engaged sifting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is just such a book."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald Review

"With this detailed, authoritative, and insightful analysis of Tender Is the Night, Chris Messenger shows convincingly why it deserves to be placed alongside The Great Gatsby as a major work of American fiction. Messenger's enthusiasm for and admiration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's artistry are apparent throughout, as are his command of the full range of Fitzgerald's fiction and of the highly original and often-surprising sources, both literary and biographical, that he cites as underlying the themes and plot in Tender. In this knowledgeable, far-ranging, and ground-breaking study, Tender Is the Night receives the informed scrutiny it has long deserved but previously has too infrequently received."—Jackson R. Bryer, coeditor of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-First Century and Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald