Customer Reviews

Tommy's Tale: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I thought this was going to be an exciting read, with all the hype, advertisement, and promotion this book has been receiving. However, I was a little disappointed. Yes, this would make a great story, but......after so many chapters of indecisive plotlines, it gets a little annoying. The numbered outlines about his depression all become a little redundant when repeated again and again through-out the book. And the fairy tale chapters intermingled through-out the book really ruined the flow of the book, and for no good reason. The author states in Chapter 16, "Sometimes I think Sadie should be the one writing a book", "But not a rambly (his spelling), confessional sort of one like this". I think that explains the whole problem with this book. It rambles on a little too long, to the point where you do not care about these characters and their lives anymore.

I gave this book three stars for one reason only, I found the story itself interesting, even if it was over-dramatized. The story's protagonist is 29 year old Tommy, who lives in London. He has a fear of commitment, doing without his daily drugs, and being unable to live a free and wild lifestyle. He begins to question his life when he meets a new boyfriend with a son named Finn. Can Tommy make a commitment, and at the same time become a father? Can he give up drugs, and his wild nightlife?

This is a easy read, but I found by the end of the book, I could care less about the Tommy character, who is too self-centered, dramatic, and lacking in real emotion. Charlie, Sadie and Bobby were much more likable. Will I read the next book by Cumming's? Yes. This is a debut novel, so we will see if this fine screenwriter and actor, turns out to be a fine novelist in the future, too.

Joe Hanssen

At one point in this novel, the narrator Tommy says that the book he is writing is "a rambly, confessional sort of one. . ." If that was Mr. Cumming's goal he achieved it although at times I got impatient with his chatty, meandering, self-absorbed and self indulgent hero, if you can call him that. Tommy is a 29 year-old Brit who never met a drug or an orifice as found on either male or female that he didn't want to enter. But he's an equal opportunity type of guy. His orifices are there for the taking too. You see, Tommy lives with two close friends, Sadie and Bob, his extended family, whom he takes baths with; he is seeing Charles who has an eight year old son, whom Tommy adores. Then there are India and other women and men along the way with whom he shares both his body and drugs.

Tommy is an arm-chair philosopher as well and has opinions on practically every subject. For example, he abhors the term "making love". "Making love sounds like a hobby, don't you think? Like a kit you'd buy from B&Q. It sounds like a Marks and Spencer frozen meal. It sounds like death, and if you didn't get it you were out of the picture." And in what must be a first in fiction, Tommy gives a page and a half treatise on the dilemma men face in choosing whether to stand or sit while urinating.

Mr. Cumming is certainly a clever and amusing writer. A character paints the town puce. Another character is described as "the aforementioned artist formerly known as girlfriend." And Tommy wonders why no one has ever told the queen "how weird her hair looks." (I wonder about that, myself, since the press tells her almost daily how weird her family is.)

One of the most entertaining sections of this little tale is Tommy's impressions of New York and the Americans when he arrives in the Big Apple on a two week assignment as a photographer's assistant. ("Tommy Takes Manhattan.") He opines on the bath as favored by the Brits with American's love affair with the shower. "The land of the free is a shower-obsessed country. . ." On seeing New York, "I've also found that the best way to view the city is to look up, always look up. There are treasures to behold that you could easily miss." Finally there's the American woman Tommy meets in a bar who is crazy about the British. She invites him to the ladies' room for fun and games and says her name is Dorothy but misses his tongue-in-cheek remark that he had always been her friend, i.e., a friend of Dorothy.

Mr. Cumming, playing the deus ex machina card, ties up all the loose ends of the plot a little too easily in the last few pages by jumping a year forward. ("One Year Later") Although this little novel is not Booker Prize material, it certainly has its moments.

Tommy's Tale is described on its jacket cover as "rollicking". And it is. Written by Alan Cumming, this book is sharp, smart, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly poignant. Tommy, the narrator of the story, is a 29-year-old adolescent. He has made a choice not to grow up and he revels in his decadent lifestyle. Living in London with his friends and roommates Sadie and Bobbie, he lives a self-indulgent life of drugs, sex, and parties.

As he approaches his thirtieth birthday however, Tommy suddenly finds himself faced with the very emotions and feelings he's been trying so hard to avoid. It seems like everyone is telling him to grow up, including his sort-of boyfriend Charlie, who is ready for more of a commitment. Even Charlie's charming eight-year-old son wants Tommy to be more responsible and be his "second daddy". Most demanding, though, is Tommy's own desire to have a true family of his own.

Tommy's bad decisions continue to pile up, and he resorts to more and more drug use in an effort to stem the rising tide of depression. Will he be able to overcome his excesses and be the man his friends and family need him to be?

This is Alan Cumming's first novel, but I'm hoping it won't be his last. Cumming is better known for his Tony Award-winning turn as the emcee in Cabaret. He has also starred in quite a few recent movies, including his critically acclaimed cowritten, coproduced, codirected and costarred The Anniversary Party. Cumming writes in a very personal style. It feels as if you are having a conversation with an old friend in your favorite bar. He has a knack for capturing the small things in life that make his story feel all the more real. This isn't for the moralistic or squeamish. He tends to glamorize drug use, although he doesn't pull any punches when it comes to their effects, and the sex is graphic and abundant. My biggest reservation about this book was the predictable and somewhat flat ending. It leaves you with warm fuzzies and wraps everything up neatly (perhaps too neatly), but it doesn't quite live up to the rest of the story. You can't help but get the feeling that perhaps Cumming is already thinking about the screenplay for his first novel and wrote the perfect, feel-good, Hollywood ending. Still, Tommy's Tale is one of my favorite books I've read in a while.

Tommy's Tale was simply amazing, for lack of a better word. Many would complain that Cumming's style (rather erratic and jumpy) becomes annoying fairly quickly. The novel is written in a journal-like fashion, with there really being no distinct plot line and no real purpose save the story of the life of the main character, Tommy.

That, I believe, was the entire point. I truly do not think that this book was meant to be like a regular story. Only those with an open mind can truly understand the deeper emotions hidden behind the words.

If you are looking for a regular beginning, rise, climax, fall, end story, this is not the book for you. However, if you're looking for something comepletely different, unique, deliciously addictive and a little sex, drugs, and more sex thrown into the mix, then you need to get this book as soon as possible.

"Tommy's Tale" is a coming-of-age-a-bit-late story of a man pushing 30 who never emotionally matured past adolescence. He lives with his flat-mates, Sadie and Bobby, each of whom he considers more family than friend. Cumming's portrayal of a person who feels no need to conform to social expectations is refreshing and honest, not contrived. The story begins when the sudden realization that he wants to settle down and have a child clashes directly with his free and easy lifestyle. This novel chronicles Tommy's attempts to reconcile his conflicting desires as his 30th birthday approaches.

The first three-quarters of this book are comical, descriptive and all around interesting. Tommy's a funny guy, if a bit of a drama queen; a good natured party boy who considers himself a sensualist, enjoying his sexual and narcotic induced experiences for what they are: experiences. Cumming supplied several laugh-out-loud moments within the first 20 pages; his "rules of depression" are beyond funny in their veracity. However, tension begins to mount as Tommy slips deeper and deeper into the chaos of his own making. And this is when the narrative goes awry.

Tommy has more of an ability to rationalize his actions than any character I've recently encountered. This works well in the beginning of the novel, because Tommy genuinely duels with himself, changing his mind and revising his actions. Despite his self-excusing, Tommy does take responsibility for his behavior. However, from his trip to NYC on, Tommy just seems to go into a psychological coma, where his internal jousting transforms into whiny justification. I kept hoping for a surprise character revelation, a tragedy, anything that would bring Tommy back to life. The moment he stepped off of the plane in NY he became a sketch, a caricature. My instinct is that the completion of this book was rushed and so the same descriptive detail is not found towards the end that sang off the first pages. The first part of this book is just too good to not notice the crash and burn ending. I finished the novel and went "Huh? Where did that come from?" The ending was so predictable, it was shocking. And what about Tommy's 30th birthday, mentioned so often in the beginning and completely skipped over in the ending narrative?

Cumming's promise as a writer shines through the majority of "Tommy's Tale". He has a unique voice and a shockingly frank sense of emotional honesty (and dishonesty). I recommend this book due to the excellence of the narrative at the beginning, but I do hope that Cumming's next novel is more consistent.

For Alan Cumming's first attempt at a novel, I thought this was very engaging and a very easy read, due to the style of the writing with the first person narrative that constantly addresses the reader as if you were in a conversation with the author. I certainly enjoyed the insight this gave me into his head. I found the tangential observations to be entertaining and made the storytelling more personal. I am mystified by the reviewer who criticized the numbered outlines about Tommy's depression "repeated again and again throughout the book", when the rules of depression actually only appear once and then are just referred to one other time. Regardless, I loved reading about Tommy's exploits, sexual and drug-related. I am not a big fan of drugs myself, but that didn't stop me from enjoying "Trainspotting" or this book (in fact, he makes a reference to the film that surprised me so much I laughed out loud, after making comparisons in my head all along). That is why we read books and watch movies, for a glimpse of experiences outside our own. Cumming's language is delightfully colloquial, giving the narrative an English flavor without so much slang as to make it unreadable to Americans (as "Trainspotting" did). One of the first rules of writing is to "find your voice"; Alan Cumming has definitely found his, and I hope he uses it to write again.

Hi. I am a great fan of Alan Cumming, so when I heard he wrote a novel, I had to read it, so I got it from the library and now I'm buying it. Don't think my love for him prejudices my opinion of the book, though. It really is a masterpiece. Any psychologist or druggie alike would love this book. It goes into the head of a truly "true" guy and brings you into a different world. The name is perfect, it is really Tommy's Tale. It's amazing and people should read it. However, keep in mind that you must be prepared for it. I know there are plenty of people who wouldn't understand it at all. That's okay, though; there's always those people. Read it. If you don't get it, just leave it alone. You either will someday or have already passed that point. I love it, but liking it probably isn't really the point. Read it.

Because of my newfound interest in Alan Cumming as the brilliant actor he is, I was pleased to find Tommy's Tale so readily available. I was pleased as well to see it portrayed in The Anniversary Party, Cumming's "insive and realistic comedy of manners," per Stephan Holden of The New York Times. I have read the book once and suspect I will like it more each time I reread it. As a literary scholar, I can see its merit not only as Lesbigay fiction, but also as an important modern day parallel The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, who wrote of the debaucheries of Nero (65 A.D.), who "compelled [Petronius] to kill himself" (14). The autobiographical content on each book is worthy of further study.

Interestingly, my 1934 copy of the latter was translated by no less than Oscar Wilde, another important observer of human existence. Although many readers will no doubt go no further than the surface details of each book, the true value of each is in between the lines. As Shakespeare says many times in many ways, a reader/listener who would do the work of delving deeper is much appreciated by the writer. In the end of both Petronius and Cumming's tales, the sadder but wiser narrator learns the joys of a more modest and intentional lifestyle, but notes that in order to gain such wisdom, painful mistakes must be made. Though this applies to both narrators, ancient and modern, it is a life lesson for us all: as Glinda the Good Witch of the North says to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, you have to learn it for yourself.

To echo past reviewers, this is not a future classic. I'm sure that the plot and character development could be better, the theme less transparent, so on and so forth. But, in the end, Tommy's Tale is one of the best books I've read in a long long time.

It's fascinating and, yes, sometimes deep in that unexpectedly-interesting-conversation-with-a-stranger sort of way. We get to know Tommy, the narrator, focal point, and more or less entire substance of the novel. But, in that still rare feat, we get to BE Tommy for those 264 pages. And for those of us who don't actually want to partake in the Drugs, Sex, and Rock n Roll (more heavy on the drugs and the sex) lifestyle, it's a fun ride. I don't mean to disparage this book into a meaningless description of debauchery. It's also often poignant, literally laugh out-loud funny, and almost Jerry Seinfeld observant of the little details of life.

True, the ending falls flat. Yes, obvious plot devices abound. And yet isn't it funny how far I'll go to defend it? Maybe in the end that's one of the biggest compliments to a novel: just how much it has wormed its way into your heart.

This was the most fun I've had reading a book in a long time.
I will say, however, if you don't have an open mind, it's not for you. Even if you have to tell yourself you have an open mind, it's not for you.
As a previous reviewer pointed out, the rambling narrative is intentional. You're meant to be inside the mind of this character, and the author does a wonderful job of taking you on the roller-coaster ride that is Tommy's existence.
If you're able to sit back and just let the story take you, I promise you will have a great time.