Tommy's Tale: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Alan Cumming (Author) "You know what I really hate most of all in the whole wide world?..." (more)
Key Phrases: disabled loo, depression rules, second dad, New York, Upper Street, Jesus Christ (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In his debut novel Tommy's Tale, Alan Cumming writes like the love child of Nick Hornby and Dan Savage. His protagonist, Tommy, an E-popping, pansexual Londoner, reads like one of Hornby's won't-grow-up urban Peter Pans. The plot, of course, lies in seeing these characters dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood. Tommy eventually follows this story arc, but with a lot of absolutely filthy sex thrown in along the way--that's where the Dan Savage factor comes into play. Like that august columnist, Tommy never met a sex act he didn't want to a) engage in, and b) describe in lifelike detail. Aside from his sexcapades, Tommy spends his time hanging out with his sort-of boyfriend Charlie, working as a photographer's assistant, taking drugs, and creating a bohemian dream flat with his beloved roommates. His life is about fun until he finds himself growing attached to Charlie's 8-year-old son Finn. As a result of this relationship, he develops an itch to have a kid of his own, and the rest of this hyperkinetic, diaristic novel is devoted to that pursuit. Unfortunately, Tommy is a narrator utterly without a filter--he just natters on and on about whatever enters his head. At best, this style is chatty. At worst, it's out-and-out logorrhea. As an actor and a screenwriter, Alan Cumming is a dizzyingly sophisticated, gleefully ironic, and achingly sentimental force. Alan Cumming as an author is, well, not. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
A young British pansexual with a penchant for chemical and physical excess stars in award-winning actor Cumming's (Cabaret, Eyes Wide Shut) zany debut. As his 30th birthday looms, Tommy grapples with both his desire to have a child and his fear of settling down. He also embarks on numerous benders ("I have coke spilling out of my left nostril, a ten-pound note jammed up my right"), while roommates Bobby, a gay lamp-shade designer, and Sadie, a mother-figure of sorts, plus lover Charlie and Charlie's eight-year-old son, try to help Tommy grow up. Cumming infuses the narrative with obscenities, puns, pop culture references and fairy tales, the latter appearing at crucial points in the plot as thinly veiled stories about Tommy himself. Cumming also gleefully overemploys the literary gimmick: there are lists of advice on anything from drinking to depression, flashbacks, jump cuts ("we're doing one of those time-jump things," Tommy notes), subtitles, interviews and direct appeals to the reader. Though at times insightful and clever ("Charlie belonged to that lucky, lucky group of normal people who are not waiting for their lives to start," Tommy says of his lover), the book often feels as hysterical and muddled as its narrator does. While Cumming explores plenty of graphic sexual escapades, bigger matters-such as Tommy's transformation from boy to man at the book's end-are left unexamined. At the core of this book is a charming personality-intelligent, frolicking, sensitive and sexual-but only rarely does it emerge from amid the extremes of story and style.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperEntertainment; 1st edition (August 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060394447
• ISBN-13: 978-0060394448
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,198,653 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Rambling Confession", September 25, 2002

By	Joseph J. Hanssen "Joe" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Written for a selected few..., December 19, 2004

By	Evra Von "Snake" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A "Rambly, Confessional" Tale, May 2, 2004

By	H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.