TENDER IS THE NIGHT
Recently a good friend insisted I read Tender Is The Night, the last novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, after I complained about trying to read This Side Of Paradise (his first) and hating it. She forced the book on me, and I set it aside and forgot about it; then this week I was headed out the door to grab some dinner before a meeting, and the book was there on the table and I snatched it up on a whim and took it with me. At the restaurant the DJ was way too loud, I had to read the first page literally three or four times before I started to actually retain anything.
But once I started paying attention, I was enthralled--this may very well be one of the best intros to a book I've ever read, the quality of the prose, the setting, the slow slide into the story... just amazing. Here's the first few paragraphs:
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.
The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse's Hotel. The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one's eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood--she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:
"Something tells me we're not going to like this place."
"I want to go home anyhow," the girl answered.
!!! Just amazing. I love the paragraph that begins, "The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one." What a sentence! You have the whole scene right there--when I came to that sentence is when I forgot about the overloud DJ and immediately started wishing I had my sketchbook with me to draw it. But with the description of the daughter, I forgot all about it; I was in love: "...who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame." I love this passage so much that I'm tempted not to continue reading the book--it's like meeting a girl who you fall for in an instant, your mind is filled with possibility and excitement. But over time exposure tires you both out, and what was fresh and new is old and hackneyed and dull, and privately you both wish you could meet another person that exciting and new. Haha, but of course you can't not be excited about your new girl, can you? And of course I will read this book--if it's even a third as good as this first page, it will be a good book indeed.
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