Tender Is the Night
Fitzgerald's most autobiographical novel. Dick and Nicole Diver's marriage on the French Riviera, its beauty and its disintegration. A love story about the corrosive effects of wealth and illness on passion; the tenderness of the title is the tenderness of something that was real and is being slowly consumed. Fitzgerald at his most honest.
Fitzgerald rebuilt this novel for nine years and never solved it: the long Rosemary opening sells you a glamour the book then revokes, Dick's collapse happens mostly offstage in summary, and the incest at the story's root gets handled with averted eyes. He kept tinkering after publication; a reordered edition exists because even the author voted against the structure.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
