"Tender Is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

An audio book.

American Rosemary arrives with her twice-widowed mother at a little hotel 5 miles from Cannes. It's the 1920s? Rosemary's been famous for a few months, having appeared in a film. She was filming in a Venice canal when she caught pneumonia. She's still recovering. She and her agent mother are close friends. Rosemary went to school in France.

They meet Brits, Americans, and a few French. Gays, ex-pats, etc. The war still casts a shadow. Class and honour are issues. There's a duel with pistols. The Russians have gone. Bad-tempered Mr McKisco is writing a novel like Ulysses but spread over a century. Rosemary thinks that Dick Diver is adorable. So is his wife Nicole. The season is coming to a close. Rosemary and the Divers go to Paris. With her mother's agreement, Rosemary offers herself to sensible, caring, ex-psychiarist Dick who tells her he's in love with his beautiful wife. He sleeps with Rosemary after due reflection.

Dick once got into a fight, was arrested and released. He started drinking. People noticed a change. He dealt with a dead body found in Rosemary's hotel room, to save her reputation. An American man was shot from a train by an American woman. Dick helped. He was asked by a rich father to cure his only son of homosexuality.

Then we get Dick's backstory. He was studying in Europe when he met a beautiful patient, Nicole, who started sending him letters. Her rich, widowered father once abused her. She's fluent in 3 languages. They married and had children (who are barely mentioned). He wrote a series of text books. He's advised that having patients will help him write books. With her money (people are suspicious of his motives for marrying her) he invested in a clinic, worked there, and did ok. Then they left to spend a life of leisure. Their marriage went cold. They both had affairs.

When she implicitly confesses her affair with Tommy, he withdraws. He can't help her, he says, he has to look after himself. She's always found it hard to feel sorry for healthy people, but she feels sorry now. She says it hasn't been the same since they met Rosemary. Tommy says Dick still treats Nicole like a patient. Nicole realises that Dick has anticipated this separation. He's interrupted by a phone-call. Friends are in trouble and as usual he helps, arranging a deal with the police, involving money.

He returns to the States, intending that the children will follow. She hears from him sometimes. He starts work, but has to give up. Maybe later he found someone.

Some sentences stand out -

• "Full of the slack he had taken up from others"
• "Sees floating ... boats like swans and swans like boats"
• He's impressed that the fenicular carriages are built at an angle, like the dipping hat of someone who doesn't want to be recognised.
• "as deliberate as a man getting drunk after battle"
• amorality was "the pension on which her own emotions had retired"

Other reviews

• readinasinglesitting (Nicole, once struggling and institutionalised and reliant on Dick to help navigate through her life, slowly becomes the usurper as Dick himself begins to lose his grasp on reality, falling victim to an absurdly inflated sense of self-importance and an increasingly diminished sense of agency or purpose. Its almost disturbing to watch this parabola of being unfold, as one cant help but wonder whether, and to what degree, Nicole uses her illness to manipulate her husband into such a state. ... The inconsequentiality of the Divers lives is markedly obvious in their nomadic existence: they travel from what is essentially resort to resort, leaving little impact other than gossip or scandal. ... The degree to which Dicks life as a professional has become entirely untenable is highlighted through a series of cringingly awkward, socially inept, and generally unpleasant actions on Dick's behalf,)
• wikipedia