Novel instructions

The failure of Tender Is the Night never stopped hurting him. So when he inscribed copies of the book, he would give people instructions on how to read it.

Matthew J. Bruccoli, quoted in Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas A. Basbanes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Honors English at Ohio University in 1962 meant skipping freshman English and instead taking sophomore-level classes in American literature. One of the many books we read in these classes was F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Meanwhile a roommate took freshman English. One day I heard him raving about The Great Gatsby, another Fitzgerald novel that had been assigned by his professor.

I thought Tender Is the Night an OK novel, more interesting than some we read but hardly the best either. And I never heard anyone in my class praising it the way my roommate praised Gatsby. For the first time I felt a pang of regret at being stuck in honors English while other freshmen got to read Gatsby.

Since its publication in 1934, Tender Is the Night has failed to generate as much excitement as The Great Gatsby (1925). It hasn't sold nearly as many copies. Critics haven't given it as much attention. Movie producers haven't been as eager to turn it into films. The late Matthew J. Broccoli, once the foremost expert on Fitzgerald and his work, told Nicholas A. Basbanes that the failure of Tender Is the Night broke the author's heart. He so obsessed about the book that he decided he had structured it wrong. At the time of his death a copy of the novel was found that had been torn apart, the chapters reordered in a way that, in Fitzgerald's view, made the novel easier to follow.

When he inscribed the book, he began to include instructions that the reader begin reading at page 151, then go back to the beginning. Later Fitzgerald's revision of the novel was published, but it was received by critics and readers with no more enthusiasm than the original.

Instructions on how to read a book are not uncommon in nonfiction. Writers will sometimes give us an outline of the book in their introduction, even to the point of telling us what each chapter is about and summarizing the main points. They may go as far as to suggest that certain chapters can be skipped altogether because they contain mostly technical information that won't interest every reader.

In fiction such advice from an author is rare, considered a no-no except sometimes in first-person narratives where the advice seems to be coming not from the author but from the fictional narrator.

A notable exception is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the beginning of which Mark Twain placed two notes. The more famous one says, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." In the second he explains the various dialects he uses, adding "I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding."

Most of us, I'm sure, have read novels that we wish had come with the authors' instructions on how to read them.