TOMCAT IN LOVE
By Tim O’Brien
Broadway Books, 347 pages, $26
A Tim O’Brien hero is easy to ideate: the obsessive Vietnam veteran trapped by his past, fixated upon simple activities and icons to keep at bay the big issues and fears, capable of flaying conventional wisdom to reveal a naked truth. In general, O’Brien brilliantly balances dark impulses and innocent affections, creating complex characters who demand, if not our full sympathy, certainly our full acknowledgment. “Tomcat in Love” features many O’Brien trademarks, yet with a new tone and in different proportion.
A professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota narrates with free-floating reliability the story of his recent rejection by his wife of 20 years. Lorna Sue has fallen in love with “a hairy tycoon” she met in Florida. Aiding her decision to abandon her husband is an incendiary cache of documents (described cagily throughout the novel) that he has hidden-and that her brother, Herbie, has unearthed-beneath the matrimonial mattress. Herbie and Lorna Sue and the narrator, Thomas Chippering, have been engaged in an intimate and fractious triangle since childhood, exchanging allegiances among themselves, always leaving one on the outside. Herbie once tried to crucify his sister (she bears the star-shaped scar on her palm), while Chippering managed to deflower her on a Pontiac. Both men worship her; the book is the story of their odd and abiding entanglement.
The book covers other triangulated relationships as well. While he’s pursuing Lorna Sue to get revenge, Chippering is being pursued by Mrs. Kooshof, a sexy, middle-age woman Chippering finds living in his former house. She’s a gorgeous willing accomplice (as most of the women in the novel are, at least at first), and she enters into the narrator’s obsession for revenge without hesitation. While Chippering promises revenge on Lorna Sue, his former Vietnam Green Beret comrades appear to be plotting against Chippering. It’s a world run by long-term debt and vengeance.
On occasion the narrator addresses his purported audience, the hypothetical, jilted “you” whose spouse has fled to Fiji with a redhead named Sandra. The bereft lover is the injured party to whom “Tomcat in Love” is dedicated, for “Fiji is Boston or London or Santa Fe or wherever else your faith has gone.” The discomfort such a premise creates is that although “you” may read as a rejected party, “you” do not want to identify very closely with Thomas Chippering, who, whatever good qualities he possesses–wit, passion, inventiveness–is also an annoyance.
He’s an inveterate womanizer, and the women keep falling into his lap. But in Chippering’s version of the mating game, it’s difficult to discern who’s prey and who’s predator. The novel’s females are as wily and highly sexed, as manipulative and whiny, as crass and devious as Chippering. The reader follows Chippering from one deluded event to another, observing as he misinterprets every exchange between himself and a female, as he mistakes anger for ardor time and again.
If the book is to be merely a lark, a rollicking, picaresque romp through the aftermath of a messy marriage wherein we follow a frustrated Don Juan as he enacts his fun-filled revenge, then one can applaud O’Brien’s utter refusal to treat his premise with the heavy hand of 1990s psycho-talk-show-twelve-step sincerity. In some other writer’s hands, Chippering would be a sex addict, and Lorna Sue would be an incest victim or a narcissist. The trouble is that the emotional backdrop of the novel is heartbreakingly serious, yet the novel’s surface seems to want to denigrate and deny that seriousness. It’s a novel in which content and form grate against each other.
In the best of the picaresque, one thing leads to another, snowballing beautifully out of control. But “Tomcat in Love” begins at a high pitch and maintains it, events not necessarily building upon one another in some chaotic chase of cause and effect, but rather randomly. The typical picaresque hero also possesses an enchanting innocence for the reader to fall back on, a quality the jaded Chippering lacks.
His jadedness takes the form of relentless sexual innuendo. Every gesture suggests sex to Chippering. Every utterance becomes an opportunity for a double entendre, and such syntactical pyrotechnics wear out the reader.
The best parts of the book are the flashbacks, terrific set pieces, stories of the narrator’s first sexual experience, his strange abandonment in Vietnam by a collection of Green Berets, and other episodes of youthful disaster. These vignettes appear as small gems set willy-nilly in the text, brief evidence of a more full character. Something happened to Chippering, in the intervening 20 years of his life and marriage, that feels absent and unaccounted for in the novel. Perhaps that gap is a reflection of the gap between emotional realism and stylistic parody that the book also attempts to bridge.
The most obvious book to compare “Tomcat in Love” to is “Lolita,” whose narrator is also a “wordsmith,” whose fatal actions are driven by matters not so much of the heart as of the pants, and whose desperate need to justify his behavior inspires his confessional tract. Like Humbert Humbert, Thomas Chippering is fueled by the twin engines of lustful obsession and insatiable jealousy. But if “Lolita” is, eventually, an elegy, then “Tomcat in Love” is more along the lines of a limerick, more full of whimsy than woe, finally tawdry rather than tender. As we follow Humbert we learn to care not so much for him as for his sickness. But Chippering doesn’t reveal any complicating features of his obsession. It does not, as Humbert’s does, finally unveil a larger truth about our hypocritical culture.
Or maybe Chippering is intended to be less Humbert confessor and more of the beleaguered academic strain, whose presence in literature is often refreshingly unpolitically correct (witness Kingsley Amis’ “Lucky Jim” and, most recently, Richard Russo’s “Straight Man”). Given that lens through which to view Thomas Chippering, the big crime is simply that, although he’s a cunning linguist, he isn’t funny. He has a sense of humor but it’s of the bitter, punning, narrow, academic sort that makes one cringe.
Tim O’Brien is an astonishing writer when his subject matter is treated with the disarming paradoxical intensity, the light touch with the sharp scalpel that he so eloquently brandished in “The Things They Carried.” Of course, he does not want to be trapped either by subject matter (Vietnam) or style (hybrid memoir/fiction). The lesson this book reinforces is that love’s ledger (a literal ledger, in the case of Chippering) never balances, that despite any brainy academic reckoning the heart will still prevail as a loose and firing cannon. Beneath the wry professorial tone of “Tomcat in Love,” lurking in the bawdiness and hyperbole, is the affecting story of a wounded man. Chippering’s desire for revenge is thrillingly bloodthirsty, and his obsessive sexual appetite enthralling-but the character’s actions tend to discredit those urges by turning him into parody, pitiful rather than sympathetic. The writer seems to dislike his character, to hold him in contempt and at some scornful distance, which stance ultimately seems disingenuous.
