Tomcat in Love

August 31, 1998
All of O'Brien's previous six novels, except perhaps The Nuclear Age, have a Vietnam War experience at their core. Men (and women) at war--and warring with war's aftermath--are themes that have sustained O'Brien's gifted narrative rushes and his beautiful prose, garnering him high praise, including a National Book Award (for Going After Cacciato). After the mixed reception of In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien said he would stop writing fiction for a while. His return here will be welcomed by his many fans, but he is not in top form. The "Tomcat" of the title is one Thomas Chippering, a 6'6'' professor of linguistics whose wife has left him for "a tycoon in Tampa." Chippering narrates his woes, his scheme for revenge, the background to what he insists is his deep love for the departed Lorna Sue, all the while pursuing nubile coeds and the wife of a convicted tax felon. Although the book is being positioned as a comedy, Chippering is a most obnoxious companion, so terribly self-deluded, self-absorbed and self-satisfied, so pedantic and boorish, so convinced of his own charms that the unfolding drama of his pursuit of revenge becomes discomfiting. We want to root for his ex-wife, but through the Chippering "song of myself" we don't hear her, or know her. The Vietnam experience here, what there is of it, is ludicrously, and even disrespectfully, invoked by Chippering, who will remind those who attempt to resist his advances that he is a war hero. Although O'Brien is on interesting ground laying out Chippering's childhood crush on Lorna Sue in 1950s Minnesota, the book careens toward an unconvincing portrait of madness that is irritatingly flippant and shrill. BOMC and QPB alternates. Agent, Lynn Nesbit; editor, John Sterling.

May 1, 1998
Thomas Chippering longs for his ex-wife even while bedding his prettiest students. But he's also falling for a married woman. With a $175,000 publicity campaign.

Starred review from July 1, 1998
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 of 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 a psychiatrist. 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, 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. ((Reviewed July 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)