Tomcat in Love Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Tomcat in Love? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Tomcat in Love. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Tomcat in Love ReviewTim 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.Tomcat in Love Overview

Want to learn more information about Tomcat in Love?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now