"Tender is the Night" has many flashes of brilliance and can be supremely evocative, but I cannot agree with Pietro Citati that it is Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Gatsby is perfect and feels effortless whereas this more ambitious book seems at time belabored. As Citati says it is a book about charm and I would add about the evanescent quality of time - the fleeting moment, the revealing gesture, the odd lapse, the exact second when life's plot turns. It is also a novel about decadence, wasting one's talent, coming short, the things that Fitzgerald thought about himself and that thicker writers like Hemingway said about him. But Hemingway, often thought the greater of the two has not lasted as well. His macho poses are embarassing and terribly dated ("such a lady", as Robert Hughes said). On the contrary, Fitzgerald remains true. Even if "Tender is the Night" is not his masterpiece, it still is a moving, modern novel.
