Tomcat in Love [Paperback]

Tim O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999

In this wildly funny, brilliantly inventive novel, Tim O'Brien has created the ultimate character for our times. Thomas Chippering, a 6'6" professor of linguistics, is a man torn between two obsessions: the desperate need to win back his former wife, the faithless Lorna Sue, and a craving to test his erotic charms on every woman he meets.

But there are complications, including Lorna Sue's brother, Herbie, with whom she has an all-too-close relationship, and the considerable charms of Chippering's new love, the attractive, and of course already married, Mrs. Robert Kooshof, who may at last satisfy Chippering's longing for intimacy.

In Tomcat in Love, Tim O'Brien takes on the battle of the sexes with astonishing results. By turns hilarious, outrageous, romantic, and deeply moving, this is one of the most talked about novels in years: a novel for this and every age.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

To date, Tim O'Brien's novels have all shared common traits: his heroes hail from the Midwest, usually Minnesota; Vietnam figures prominently; and the stories he tells, though invested with mordant wit, are usually pretty grim. So an O'Brien fan coming to Tomcat in Love on the heels of his earlier novels can be forgiven for occasionally checking the name on the cover (and the photo on the dust jacket) just to be sure this is, indeed, the same Tim O'Brien who wrote Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and In the Lake of the Woods.

In Tomcat in Love O'Brien introduces us to a very different hero: "In summary, then, my circumstances were these. Something over forty-nine years of age. Recently divorced. Pursued. Prone to late-night weeping. Betrayed not once but threefold: by the girl of my dreams, by her Pilate of a brother, and by a Tampa real-estate tycoon whose name I have vowed never again to utter." Thomas H. Chippering, professor of linguistics, war hero, and sex magnet--in his own mind, at least, has recently lost his childhood sweetheart and wife of 20 years to another man, the Tampa magnate, and Lorna Sue's desertion has clearly unhinged him. He has taken to flying down to Tampa from Minnesota on weekends to spy on his ex-wife and plot revenge against her, the tycoon, and Lorna Sue's brother, Herbie, whom he blames for destroying his marriage.

Thomas, Lorna Sue, and Herbie go back a long way together, bound equally by ties of love, guilt, and suspicion. Dating from the afternoon young Herbie nailed an even younger Lorna Sue's hand to a makeshift cross, Thomas has occupied a kind of emotional no man's land between the two: "In my bleakest moods, when black gets blackest, I think of it as a high perversion: Herbie coveted his own sister. Which is a fact. The stone truth. He was in love with her. More generously, I will sometimes concede that it was not sexual love, or not entirely, and that Herbie was driven by the obsessions of a penitent, a torturer turned savior. Partly, too, I am quite certain that Herbie secretly associated me with his own guilt. I was present at the beginning. My backyard, my plywood, my green paint."

Chippering takes his revenge to hilarious lengths, starting with a purple leather bra and panties stuffed beneath the seat of the tycoon's car and escalating from there. But even as he attempts to wreak havoc in his ex-wife's life, he succeeds in laying ruin to his own. His self-proclaimed irresistibility to women gets him in hot water with both his female students and his administration; his obsession with Lorna Sue threatens his budding romance with Mrs. Robert Kooshof, a woman who loves him as his wife never did--and, oh yes, there's that little matter of the squad of Green Berets he crossed many years before in Vietnam who may or may not be hunting him down.

Once you get over the shock of this new, funny Tim O'Brien, traces of the writer you thought you knew begin to surface. Chippering might be a pompous, overbearing windbag, but you can't trust him any more than you did any of O'Brien's other earthier, equally unreliable narrators. In one breath, he tells us, "I must in good conscience point out that women find me attractive beyond words. And who on earth could blame them?" In the next he describes himself as resembling "a clean-shaven version of our sixteenth president." Half the fun of reading Tomcat in Love is trying to sort out just how much of what Thomas H. Chippering tells us is true. Stellar writing, a brilliant cast of characters, and a sly, surprising story that breaks your heart one minute and tickles your funny bone the next all make Tim O'Brien's first foray into the comic novel a resounding success. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 342 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; First Paperback Edition edition (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767902041
• ISBN-13: 978-0767902045
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (100 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #300,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

TIM O'BRIEN received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the acclaimed novels The Things They Carried and July, July. In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. O'Brien lives in Austin, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Man We Love to Hate, October 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Tomcat in Love (Hardcover)

Tim O'Brien is, without a doubt, America's premier chronicler of the Vietnam War. Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried have become classics of that era and even In The Lake of the Woods deals largely with repercussions of the war's aftermath. Tomcat in Love, however, bears no resemblance to any of O'Brien's previous works and it is, amazingly, far more inventive, original and creative.

Tomcat in Love is the darkly comic story of Minnesota resident, Thomas Chippering, a pompous, middle-aged Professor of Linguistics who has deluded himself into thinking he's irresistible to women...all of them. As Chippering, himself, says, "My celebrated biweekly seminars...are almost always booked to the limit with attentive, worshipful, ardent young lollipops eager to widen their horizons." Not since Nabokov created Humbert Humbert, has there been a more thoroughly unlikable and self-deceiving central character or one whom we so much love to hate.

Chippering is definitely a man in love with words. "Words," he says, "have genuine substance, mass and weight and specific gravity." In fact, it is words and his knowledge of them, that places Chippering far above the ordinary man and woman. For, although Chippering flirts outrageously with every woman he meets, they all rebuff him, a problem Chippering falsely attributes to their far inferior linguistic skills. It's not that he's unattractive, he thinks, women have simply failed to appreciate him. The sad truth is, Chippering has been betrayed by the very words he loves so much. He does possess the skill to manipulate words, but at the cost of being able to feel even one honest emotion, about himself or others.

Betrayed by words and betrayed by his wife of twenty-plus years, Lorna Sue (she left him for a Tampa real estate tycoon), Thomas Chippering decides to seek revenge. Exactly what this revenge entails encompasses Lorna Sue's diabolical brother, Herbie, who, as a child, had attempted to crucify Lorna Sue...literally. Although he only managed to pound one nail through her hand, Chippering still believes Lorna Sue to be scarred for life, emotionally as well as physically, and he bitterly blames Herbie for the loss of his wife.

Chippering finally finds an ally in Mrs. Robert Kooshof (he cannot call her by her first name), the wife of an imprisoned veterinarian. Together they leave for Tampa where Chippering is hateful but hilarious as he concocts first one scheme then another in an effort to destroy Lorna Sue's marriage. Once again, though, Chippering falsely attributes his own sense of betrayal to a loss of linguistic skills rather than to his wife's abandonment. "The betrayal of love," he says, "...seems also to entail a fundamental betrayal of language and logic and human meaning." Even awash in a sea of betrayal, Chippering retains his pomposity.

Does Chippering ever exact revenge? Does he ever get his well-deserved comeuppance? Our desire to know is great enough to keep us reading to the book's totally twisted and demented end.

Tim O'Brien certainly took a risk with Tomcat in Love, but he also proved he could write satire of the highest order. The fact that he makes this hyperbolic story and its cast of unlikely characters as believable and true-to-life as his previous books is testimony to his talent as a writer. Even greater is O'Brien's ability to make us care about this self-deluding Lothario par excellence. For underneath the hilarity, the manipulation and the black comedy, O'Brien has wisely planted connections that reverberate in all of us: Words have power, but words lose their meaning when devoid of the emotion that makes us human. In the final analysis, Thomas Chippering is as tragic a man as anyone could imagine.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary book...you won't be the same after reading it., January 17, 2000

By 

Robert Wellen (CHICAGO, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tomcat in Love (Paperback)

I'm enormous fan of Tim O'Brien, but to be honest, I wasn't sure of what to make of this book when it came out in hardcover. Seemed wacky, I thought. Instead, I recently picked it in paperback, and just read. I was in store for an extraordinary journey.

You have never met anyone in literature like Tom Chippering. You can't help but pull for the guy. The story is engrossing, hilarious, and often quite moving. Love, revenge, memory, friendships, new beginnings, letting go, devastation. Even if you are not much interested in the English language, you will never look at it the same way again.

I don't want to say much more about the plot, but I will say that it is constantly riveting. At the end, I cried. I'm not sure why...perhaps, sadness or happiness or emotional exhaustion...perhaps, as Tom would say, I'll never know.

I do know you should order and read this book immediately. O'Brien only enhances his status as my favorite living american writer. There is no equal.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not normal Tim, but still great, December 19, 2002

By 

ChiefSanch (New Hartford, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tomcat in Love (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book and Tim O'Brien's signature style. Once again, as with Northern Lights, it is disconnected from Vietnam, but it has ties. Tom Chippering is a veteran and their is a chapter dealing with it, holding true to Tim's faithfullnes to his past.

However, if there is anything Tim is great at writing it's the human psyche under any circumstance. Here, he beautifully portrays a pathetic, middle-aged sex addict who isn't very good at his antics of screw everything I can. He has charm, but is too hung up on his past to use it to its full potential. Instead, he is hellbent on seeking revenge upon his ex-wife, a disturbed in her own way, obsession of Chippering's. It has humor and drama, skepticism and redemption.

It isn't normal Tim O'Brien. If you've read The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato or If I Die In A Combat Zone and you really liked those for being about Vietnam, then this is not for you. But if you are a fan of literature in general and Tim O'Brien's beautiful language and, in my eyes, flawless style, then please, buy a copy of this and enjoy it. It is easily readable in a day or two because there is a subtle tension that sneaks up on you and grabs hold right at the end, so you're thankful you didn't put it down. This is a great novel. I give it my highest recommendation.