Tomcat in Love

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
September 1998

"In one sense, Tomcat in Love represents a literary departure for me. In a more important sense, however, every book is a departure: new characters, new story, new structure, new rules, new narrative voices, new ways of looking at material that matters to me," O'Brien maintains. "Though I am known as a 'Vietnam writer' - whatever that may be - I have always pegged myself more as a 'love writer,' and in that regard Tomcat in Love is no departure at all. I am still circling, after nearly thirty years, the same old obsession: how far we will go to win love, to keep love, to love ourselves." —Tim O'brien

Hailed as "the best American writer of his generation" (San Francisco Examiner), Tim O'Brien is best known for works of fiction grounded in his experience of the Vietnam War. With the publication of his last novel, In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien announced his intention to stop writing fiction "for the foreseeable future."

Now, four years later, we invite you to join us in welcoming Tim O'Brien in his return. Meet us in the auditorium to chat about his new novel, tracing one man's misguided, convoluted, relentless quest to reclaim the love of his life - or, perhaps, to find a new love - in Tomcat in Love.

"There can be little on this earth more fundamentally satisfying than a piece of intelligently conceived, impeccably executed vengeance," reflects O'Brien's ever-conniving yet hapless hero and narrator, Thomas H. Chippering, Professor of Linguistics.

Egotistical, verbose, meticulous (hepainstakinglyincludes footnotes in his own narrative), and self-described as "something over forty-nine years of age" with "height and craggy features reminiscent of our sixteenth president," Chippering has been prone to late-night weeping since the recent end of a twenty-year marriage to Lorna Sue, the doe-eyed, raven-haired, pouty-lipped beauty he has adored since the age of seven. Two obstacles stand in the way of their reunion: Lorna Sue's new husband (a hirsute tycoon from Tampa whose name Chippering refuses to utter) and her slavishly devoted, eerily omnipresent brother, Chippering's childhood chum Herbie. Of course, Chippering staunchly denies that his fondness for women - especially his young students at the University of Minnesota - and his fine art of equivocation are in any way responsible for his present state of desperation.

Faith. Roses. Pontiac. Virtue. These words haunt the narrator, as pivotal events in the life of the narrator and Lorna Sue have charged them with emotion. Increasingly, Chippering hungers for revenge, and his thoughts turn to Tampa, where the focus of his obsession now lives, content and oblivious, with her wealthy husband (and her faithful brother nearby). But before heading south to launch his attack, Chippering makes a fateful stop in Owago, Minnesota - the Rock Cornish Hen Capital of the World - to visit his boyhood home. Crumpled and sobbing in his former backyard, he meets the properties current owner, Mrs. Robert Kooshof - a tall, buxom, big-hearted, no-nonsense blonde also reeling from a spouse's betrayal, who soon becomes Chippering's reluctant accomplice, and ultimately, his savior.

In an epic struggle taking him from Minnesota to Florida and back, Chippering hatches devious plots to shatter Lorna Sue's connubial bliss; flirts shamelessly with every woman he meets; suffers public humiliation and the ruin of his career; and risks a fiery death. A complex, despicable and at the same time entirely loveable character, Chippering ultimately comes to grips with the truth - about Lorna Sue, about Herbie, about his own imperious, commitment-phobic self, and ultimately finds salvation in what makes life truly worth living. Wildly funny and surprisingly moving, Tomcat in Love is a vivid, ingenious, unforgettable tale of lust, compulsion, and disillusionment from one of today's most original and gifted writers.

BookList

To call Thomas Chippering, well-known linguistics professor, a 'womanizer' doesn't capture him. He's a woman appreciator gone wild, ogling every female he meets and often taking them on two at a time, not for sex but to talk them to death and later to categorize them in his little black book. The book is full of statistics but empty of understanding.

Tom married his childhood sweetheart, Lorna Sue, but she never loved anyone but herself. When she throws him over, he embarks on a campaign of revenge. It's a crafty, near-military campaign. Revenge and paranoia -- the stuff of sexual warfare -- drive O'Brien's novel, but Tom is on his way down for more reasons than Lorna Sue. He makes a pass at one his students, who blackmails him into writing her thesis and then turns him in for sexual harassment. Tom loses his job, descending into a brief, hilarious, sad career as a children's TV character named Captain Nineteen. Tom's a bedlam and, like Portnoy, ends up in the care of pyschiatrist. He's the classic lying narrator, a likable sociopath. All he really wants is for a woman somewhere to listen to him, yet he's so busy worshiping goddesses that when an ordinary, decent woman falls for him, yet he's so busy worshiping goddesses that when an ordinary, decent woman falls for him, he doesn't understand that she will do exactly that.

O'Brien is funny, and over the years, with the publication of his masterful war novels, has become a subtle and original stylist. But his story is simple: love is hard to find, hardest of all when you desperately need to find it.

Chicago Tribune

Tim O'Brien is an astonishing writer. Tomcat begins at a high pitch and maintains it.

Kansas City Star

A dark and thoroughly engaging comedy about the danger of obsession and the healing power of love.

Matt Cohen

Tomcat in Love is well -- sometimes very well -- written. Its plot is carefully worked out and becomes more compelling as the novel proceeds. The characters are only mildly believable, but how believable were the characters in Lolita, another book about a verbally gifted romantic?....Well-written and almost always amusing, Tomcat in Love is an entertaining book from a terrific writer whose real strengths appear to lie elsewhere. -- Globe and Mail

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[T]he reader can only wonder at the disparity between the power of . . .earlier books by Mr. Obrien —- distinguished by their inventive storytelling and their evocative depiction of the visceral and emotional realities of war — and the mangled mess that is Tomcat in Love —The New York Times

Seattle Times

Enjoyable, moving, often hilarious.

Tom Walker

After all the years of deadly serious writingO'Brien has swung from the opposite side of the plate with Tomcat. He's hit a home run. —The Denver Post

Washington Post Review

Here, for all of you with just enough time to skim the paper as you gulp your morning coffee, is the straight scoop: Tomcat in Love is a wonderful novel, laugh-out-loud funny, one of the best books I've come across in years. My advice, something I've offered only once or twice in 12 years of writing about books . . . is that you waste no more time on this review. Put down the paper. Go out and find a copy of Tomcat in Love now. It really is that good.

Library Journal

From the beginning, Thomas Chippering's life has revolved around two people: Herbie, his sociopathic playmate, and Herbie's younger sister Lorna Sue. Despite her idiosyncratic behavior and the intrusions of her lower-class family, Thomas worships her; after an odd courtship they are married. A number of years later, divorced, Thomas is still obsessed with Lorna Sue and the breakup of their relationship. A soon-to-be divorcee may be Thomas's chance for recovery and lasting love--if she can keep his mind off Lorna Sue and his hands off other female admirers. Redemption can be a hard sell in fiction, and the reader will have to muster some interest in Thomas's arrogant, Don Juanish character to make this work. O'Brien, author of In the Lake of the Woods (LJ 8/94) and a National Book Award winner for Going After Cacciato (LJ 12/15/77), lets Thomas narrate, obscuring revelations conveniently held till the end. But overlook all this, and there may be a small audience for this quirky character study. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/98.]--Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA

Seattle Times

Enjoyable, moving, often hilarious.

Boston Globe

Wickedly realized. . .nobody but O'Brien could have written some of the opening vortexes about passion and meaning.

Hartford Courant

A laugh-a-minute look at a bewildered man's tragicomic search for love in all the wrong places.

Jane Smiley

Funny stuff. . .Like all comic novels, Tomcat is a complex affair that invites a complex response and offers a complex reward. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kansas City Star

A dark and thoroughly engaging comedy about the danger of obsession and the healing power of love.

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[T]he reader can only wonder at the disparity between the power of . . .earlier books by Mr. Obrien --- distinguished by their inventive storytelling and their evocative depiction of the visceral and emotional realities of war -- and the mangled mess that is Tomcat in Love -- The New York Times

San Francisco Book Review

O'Brien has gone out on a limb, and readers will be hard-pressed not to scurry along after him.

Tom Walker

After all the years of deadly serious writing, O'Brien has swung from the opposite side of the plate with Tomcat. He's hit a home run. -- The Denver Post

Kirkus Reviews

A surprising departure for the usually somber O'Brien, this time chronicling the pratfalls of a middle-aged would-be Lothario.

Looming over Thomas Chippering's marriage through much of its two decades is the malign presence of his brother-in-law, Herbie Zylstra, a man harboring a peculiarly intense interest in his own sister, Lorna Sue. It's Herbie who finally fragments Tom and Lorna Sue's marriage, by revealing to his sister a series of minor deceits Tom's used to assuage her suspicions of his instability. Her departure and remarriage to a Florida millionaire render the generally resilient Tom alternately melancholy and manic, leading him to brood on the fact that 'we are all pursued by the ghosts of our own history, our lost loves, our blunders, our broken promises and grieving wives.'

Not unsurprisingly, this linguistics professor and (as he mentions on more than one occasion) war hero, tries first, haplessly, to win back his wife and then, also unsurprisingly, decides on revenge. He can at least pay back the twisted Herbie—'though of course matters quickly veer out of control.

While he does manage to derail Lorna Sue's marriage temporarily, he also becomes involved with the beautiful, and decidedly self-reliant, Mrs. Kooshof, whose husband is languishing in prison. Tom's decline, meanwhile, becomes a headlong rush as he's exposed by Herbie, thrashed in front of his students by Lorna Sue's husband, bereft of his job, of Mrs. Kooshof (seemingly), and briefly of his sanity. Because this is pitched as a farce, much of what happens is meant to be drolly funny and often is. But Tom is exceedingly garrulous (his first-person narrative even sports footnotes), and there are a fewpratfalls too many.