Tender is the Night

Fitzgerald's classic depicts the Jazz Age and the beautiful people who congregate on the French Riviera between the wars. In this evocative setting, amid a glamorous and harsh world of film stars, aristocrats, and socialites, Fitzgerald recounts the infatuations of American expatriates Richard Diver, a psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, his former patient. In a complex and versatile performance Trevor White skillfully portrays females voices without changing timbre and delivers nonverbal emotional utterances with verisimilitude. His youthful voice, expert pacing, and tone of empathy complement Fitzgerald's poetic chronicle of moral decline and the vagaries of fortune. One cannot overlook the parallels between Fitzgerald's own life and his account of the Divers, particularly his depiction of a gifted man who is enmeshed with a wealthy and unstable woman. A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

September 27, 2010
You can generally count on Naxos to produce superb audios of classics—but not this time. Trevor White gives a dull performance, though he handles conversation and dialogue better than straight narration and is not bad at accents. His emphases are stilted; he drops his voice at the ends of most sentences; and he reads every word so carefully he throws off the rhythms and phrasing, and thus the tone and meaning. A disappointing reading of Fitzgerald's last, most lyrical, most autobiographical novel.

George Guidall brings to this classic the competence of the skilled professional, even if there's not as much passion in his narration as some listeners might want. Yet perhaps this understated rendering is appropriate: The novel is low key, a rather uninvolving portrait of rich, expatriot Americans cavorting about Europe after WWI. It's difficult for contemporary readers to like these people although it's easy to like Fitzgerald's stunning prose. Guidall is certainly up to its demands, differentiating among the characters, handling masterfully the many French and Swiss pronunciations, even singing a couple times in the former language. For these achievements we can forgive his emotional distance. T.H. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine