The Catsitters: A Novel [Hardcover]

James Wolcott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 2001

Suppose Bridget Jones had a twin brother? Meet Johnny Downs -- Half man, half mess.

Bartender by day, actor by night, Johnny Downs cheerfully floats through life, living alone with his jukebox and his cat. But he is about to discover that while he's been floating, he's been drifting downstream -- heading for disaster. Blindsided when his dazzler of a girlfriend dumps him like yesterday's news, Johnny is wounded, stunned, and, most of all, clueless. "You're like most men -- oblivious," says his friend and mysterious confidante Darlene Ryder, a Southern belle with a steel-trap mind and a mouth to match. Her diagnosis: Johnny is doomed to be rejected by every woman he desires as long as he clings to his outmoded bachelor ways. His footloose and fancy-free playing days are over. Now it's time to suit up and play the game of love for keeps. Darlene puts him on a rigorous crash course to rebrand himself as "husband material." But does Darlene really have his best interests at heart? Is it marriage she's steering him toward, or further catastrophe? And who are these catsitters that keep coming into his life?

At turns witty and poignant, The Catsitters is an adroit comedy of contemporary manners that wickedly renders the hapless foibles of an unmarried man on the canvas of modern urban life. It is also a bulletin from deep behind the lines of the dating scene that bares one of the most closely guarded male secrets: Behind the bluster and bluff of "guy talk," most men are looking for The Right One, too. They just don't know how to look, or where to ask for help; they don't have a Darlene. Men and women alike will wince, laugh, and identify with Wolcott's portrait of what it takes to survive and triumph in the gladiator arena of high-stakes romance. The good news is that you don't have to be ruthless to win. Nice guys can finish first.

From the acerbic and sometimes controversial Vanity Fair columnist comes a surprisingly sweet-toned and embracing debut novel about sex, masculinity, and the comedy-drama of everyday life. The Catsitters is a novel even James Wolcott could love.

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (June 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060194146
• ISBN-13: 978-0060194147
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #914,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born and raised in Maryland, James Wolcott is a columnist for Vanity Fair and has written for The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, and many other publications still treading above water. He--I mean, I--also have a blog at the Vanity Fair website, where I keep tabs on politics, America's Next Top Model, the dance scene, books, birding, and generally make a nuisance of myself, but in a fun, caring way. My wife Laura Jacobs is a novelist (her latest is The Bird Catcher), a dance critic, and Vanity Fair writer, and we live a wacky sitcom life in Manhattan with our three ocicats, Jasper, Henry, and Veronica, our youngest, who deserves her own spinoff series. Each September all five of us troupe to Cape May Point, birding heaven. My next book is a memoir about the Seventies in NYC, those years of punk and Pauline Kael.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

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

By 

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended, February 2, 2010

By 

Tracy Oshima (Long Beach, California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Catsitters (Paperback)

I read "The Catsitters" in two sittings. It would have been one sitting, but I had to rip myself away from reading to go to work. Catsitters is a fun, witty, insightful read and I really enjoyed it.

Johnny is an actor who mostly is doing television commercials. When he gets dumped by his girlfriend, Nicole, he turns to his best friend Darlene for comfort, What Darlene offers is advice on turning Johnny from a bachelor to an "unmarried man." This advice is pretty humorous, but also is dead on. As another reviewer mentioned, it really is hard to believe that a man wrote this book!

The story takes some unexpected turns that really kept things interesting. This book had me laughing and crying. I would highly recommend it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's gotta be a put-on, June 22, 2004

By 

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

This review is from: The Catsitters (Paperback)

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.