The Catsitters (Paperback)

~ (Author) "AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT WAS A HUMAN CRY..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pride and Prejudice meets Swingers, and Austen wins handily. It's hard to believe this mild-mannered novel was written by the same James Wolcott who produces such withering cultural commentary in the pages of Vanity Fair. Yet The Catsitters, while purporting to depict the cutthroat world of Manhattan dating, is ultimately a sweet-tempered example of the classic Austen plot. Which is to say, our hero searches high and low for true love, only to find that it was right under his nose all along.

That's right, our hero. Instead of an Emma or an Elizabeth, we get Johnny Downs, a beefy, almost-out-of-work actor who never scores the romantic lead in either life or theater. We also get his caustic friend Darlene, who runs his life over the phone from her hometown in Georgia. This long-distance kibitzer orchestrates Johnny's dates, moderates his behavior, and ultimately sabotages his most successful love affair. And what about the titular catsitters? They turn out to be a couple of Darlene's girlfriends, who come to New York to look after Johnny's cats for a weekend and don't bother to leave, further compounding his romantic problems.

Johnny is the kind of character who seems to move through wet cement; he's likable enough, but we keep wishing he'd get his act together. In the end, he does, to the reader's rudimentary satisfaction. Still, the book is most appealing when Wolcott forgets he's writing a novel and slips into critic mode. There are some happily acerbic lines skewering the theater. An actress in a period play, for example, speaks "as if she were christening a ship." A director greets the protagonist "with both hands extended palms-down, a Fellini-like greeting that directors ought to stop imitating." The depiction of the life of a New York actor is thick with realistic detail; the romance is pure make-believe. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of Vanity Fair's famously mordant critic might be puzzled by the rather mild tone of his first novel. Johnny Downs is that echt Manhattan figure, the actor/bartender: theater is where his heart is; tending bar and appearing in commercials pay the bills. While attending a conference on theater in Athens, Ga., he meets bat-watching grad student Darlene Ryder, who's just quirky enough to pique his interest. Scotching the idea of any sexual relationship between them, Darlene installs herself as a sort of long-distance relationship guru a feminine superego to Johnny's masculine id. Whenever he makes a romantic move, she is always a telephone call away, coaching him. After he is dumped by his current girlfriend, Nicole, the Darlene/Johnny interface gets out of hand she orchestrates his parties, his dates and even arranges for a friend of hers to sit for his beloved cat, Slinky, which leads to all kinds of trouble. Darlene's boundless supply of advice and Johnny's gullible acceptance of it positions the novel as the male counterpart to Melissa Bank's Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. But when Darlene finally goes too far, sabotaging a romance that actually might work out on its own, Johnny finds out just what their friendship is all about. Although Wolcott's premise shows satiric possibility and his insights into the world of struggling actors are dead-on, the novel handicaps itself by giving Darlene's monomania center stage. Her opinions on everything from aftershave to floor tiles will exhaust readers' patience long before she exhausts Johnny's. (On-sale: June 27)

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006093218X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060932183
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,005,017 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Boring. Shallow., October 26, 2001

By	Brenda Gregoline "brenda_gregoline" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Catsitters: A Novel (Hardcover)

I couldn't stand this book. The main character was uninteresting, the plot dragged, Wolcott alternately starves the reader of information or completely overshares (we get complete rundowns of movies Johnny Downs has seen, phone conversations he's had, and not one single moment of these paragraphs illuminates the character's inner workings.) There were also multiple copy editing errors in my edition (which I blame not so much on Wolcott, but on the folks at HarperCollins), and they were of the ignorant variety rather than simple typos: "trey" for the French word "tres," "prune" instead of "prude," etc. Overall a very poor effort. I read it to the end, but it was a struggle.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Three and a half stars, August 7, 2005

By	J. A. Brown (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Catsitters was a very quick read; light and fluffy, which seems to be the author's intent. The protagonist, Johnny Downs, is a pretty well fleshed-out character, neither good nor evil. A struggling actor who seems to be muddling through life with no particular direction and little sense of decisiveness, Johnny's relationships with women keep petering out. After the latest and most humiliating breakup, he allows his closest female friend, Darlene, to groom him into a "real man" by giving him lots of lectures about what women's behavior *really* means, etc. While the character of Johnny is believable, the character of Darlene seems to be a bit cliched, though this problematic element is more satisfactorily resolved near the end. The plot is a bit meandering, which in this case isn't such a bad thing, as there is a lot of action nonetheless, and the characters are well-written for the most part. Wolcott's take on the acting circuit in NYC is funny and is believable, as this area is where he puts his more famous, snarkier commentary to work. The emotion and romance never feels too cute, but still doesn't have the same bite as a Hornby novel, as far as stories told from a male perspective.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's gotta be a put-on, June 23, 2004

By	Gooch McCracken (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) - See all my reviews

THE CATSITTERS is just the sort of thing that inspires me to plagiarize Pauline Kael. This isn't fiction-writing. It's piffle-making. It's not bad, mind you. It succeeds on its own light-comedy terms. But we're talking about something that exists in a cutesy-poo alternate-universe where close friends routinely address each other by their last names.

Roy Blount once put out a book called WHAT MEN DON'T TELL WOMEN. Wolcott's fic could've credibly been titled WHAT WOMEN DON'T TELL MEN. Cause that's the gimmick behind the Johnny/Darlene dialog. Which is the best thing on offer. The theater scenes are pretty dull because the stage-plays themselves are under-described. AN OASIS FOR FOOLS is an obvious parody of THE ICEMAN COMETH, but nothing is delivered. And Johnny's own stage-play is another blank.