A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 2000, 333 p + xlvi p of introduction and select bibliography, 10 p of Notes on the Text and 9 p of Variants in different editions. First published 1934.

Maybe it was due to my impending house removal but I just couldn’t get into this one at all. Alternatively it may be because initially I found the characters flighty and tedious, the dialogue curious. The novel is structured into three books and that too was part of the problem. Book 1 is set on the French Riviera where Dick Diver and his wealthy wife Nicole play host to a succession of vapid individuals. Their idyll is interrupted when nascent film star Rosemary Hoyt turns up at the resort with her mother and Dick is taken with her. In this section a duel between minor characters occurs – for no good reason I could see – and a body is found in a hotel bedroom with no apparent consequences.

However, things picked up in Book II where the narration flashed back to the first meeting of Dick and Nicole when he was a psychologist and she a patient. It immediately occurred to me that this would have been a better place to start the book as the situation and the characters are more interesting. In the notes at the end I discovered this was a revision that Fitzgerald had intended to make for future editions before his death and from 1948 till this Penguin edition the novel did appear with that altered structure.

By Book III the Divers’ marriage disintegrates as Dick takes to drink and Nicole becomes more and more independent.

There were a few bon mots. “A man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty Dumpty once that is meddled with.” “Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor.” “Women marry all their husband’s talents and naturally afterwards are not so impressed with them as they keep up the pretence of being.”

The book’s provenance in the 1920s was apparent in the use of the words negro and nigger and there was a reference to a “gone coon” whatever that was. (A dead duck according to Wikipedia.)

At one point another character says to Dick, “But remember what George the Third said, that if Grant was drunk he wished he would bite the other generals.” Wouldn’t it have been Lincoln who said that? Fitzgerald has also given a band with a Scottish pianist the name The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro. I think not. The repetition in the sentence, “Their fortunes had something to do with a bank in Milan that had something to do with the Warren fortunes,” struck me as clumsy. There was also filagree for filigree.

I did not read the (46 page!) introduction till after the novel and am glad of that as it gave away much of the novel’s driving force. It was also very Marxist in its interpretation, stating that the book was actually about a shift in economic structure from accumulation to reproduction.

Wiki says the Modern Library ranked Tender is the Night as 28^th in its hundred best English language novels of the early twentieth century. Evidently there’s something in there but I’m afraid it passed me by.