Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  PRAISE FOR

  AFTER LONG SILENCE

  “An extraordinary tale … eloquently written … Its complex narrative weaves back and forth between past and present, the tale and its discovery.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A spellbinding book, heartbreakingly mysterious as all true family explorations must be … Her voice is as pure as song.”

  —Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education

  “A story of safe but costly passage from one identity to another that takes us from Europe to America via World War II … [Fremont] has the intelligence and imagination to question her own motives. This allows her to question the memoir form even as she deploys it so beautifully.”

  —The New York Times

  “Moving … compelling … [an] affecting memoir.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Few writers have imagined the lives of their parents as fully and richly as Helen Fremont has done in After Long Silence. Her memoir is a harrowing journey and a brave attempt to insure that her family’s heroic suffering has not been in vain.”

  —Richard Russo, author of Straight Man and Nobody’s Fool

  “Reading this beautifully written memoir, I was amazed all over again by the suffering of the Holocaust and the remarkable power of humans to survive almost anything, except safety. After Long Silence is a stunning testimony to the power of silence and memory.”

  —Margot Livesey, author of Criminals

  “A triumphant work of art … [a] harrowing account … an incredible tale of survival, a beautiful love story and a suspenseful account of how the author’s investigation of her roots shattered fiercely guarded family secrets.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A stellar example of the new literary nonfiction. A page-turning, suspenseful narrative, a canny, wise-cracking narrator, and a subject as pertinent as today’s newspaper headlines.”

  —Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust

  “Fremont does a good job of digging for details and imagining dialogue … she lets the startling details of family history simply fall into place. The account is moving without elaboration. Fremont found her door and opened it for all to see.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Helen Fremont writes with seamless authenticity and lyric tenderness about her family’s piebald secrets.… A book that offers wise decisions and tender solace in re-weaving family bonds after silent chaos.”

  —Maria Flook, author of My Sister Life

  Praise for Tomcat in Love

  “A great American Novel.”

  —Atlanta Journal and Constitution

  “Tomcat in Love is a wonderful novel, laugh-out-loud funny, one of the best books I’ve come across in years. My advice, something I’ve offered only once or twice in twelve years of writing about books … is that you waste no more time on this review. Put down the paper. Go out and find a copy of Tomcat in Love. Now. It really is that good.… The book that chronicles [Thomas H. Chippering’s] journey to a kind of wisdom is a marvel—Jane Austen after too much Starbucks, Philip Roth with real compassion for his characters. It’s a wickedly accurate portrait of obsessive love that manages to be both fiercely comic and profoundly moving. Read it and weep. And laugh.”

  —Washington Post

  “A riotous good time. O’Brien tells one entertaining tale.”

  —People magazine

  “It’s a plain fact; don’t argue. Tim O’Brien can flat-out write.… [Tomcat in Love is] quirky and immensely satisfying.… After all the years of deadly serious writing, O’Brien has swung from the opposite side of the plate with Tomcat. He’s hit a home run.”

  —Denver Post

  “Like all comic novels, Tomcat is a complex affair that invites a complex response and offers a complex reward. Whatever O’Brien’s motives in changing his style and direction, I, for one, hope he keeps it up.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “O’Brien brilliantly balances dark impulses and innocent affections.… Tomcat in Love begins at a high pitch and maintains it.… Tim O’Brien is an astonishing writer.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Picaresque in the lusty tradition of Tom Jones, Tomcat in Love is certainly a novel for our times. Mostly hilarious, sometimes thoughtful and wise, Tim O’Brien’s latest book once again breaks the mold.… If you have a sense of humor and are willing to laugh—as well as feel sad—about the state of male-female relationships in America at the millennium, read this book. I laughed loudly and often.

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “O’Brien, best known for his critically acclaimed, if grim, stories of Vietnam, now takes us by surprise as a deft social satirist. Who knew the guy was possessed of a dark, Monty Python sense of humor.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Tomcat in Love is a powerful and brilliant book. By turns outrageously funny and deadly serious, it is always breathtakingly entertaining. It should be on everyone’s shortlist.”

  —Pittsburgh Post Gazette

  “For a guy pegged as the Vietnam novelist of his generation, National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien has executed a rip-roaring departure with his new book, Tomcat in Love.…O’Brien creates an unforgettable comic portrait that reaches profound heights of obnoxiousness before settling into a warm, resigned sympathy by the end of this hilarious, endearing book.”

  —Colorado Springs Independent

  “A rollicking wild ride of supremely bad manners. Tomcat in Love is a crazed, crazy book, exhilarating and compulsively ludicrous, merrily misogynistic and perversely patriarchically patronizing, riding on its own sheer linguistic skills and exuberance.… O’Brien manages to keep his novel teetering on the edge with his superb use of language and his compulsion to view words as omens and lethal weapons.”

  —Providence Journal Bulletin

  “Tomcat in Love reads like Richard Ford meets Carl Hiaasen.”

  —New York magazine

  “Tim O’Brien knows cold the spiraling insularity of obsession.… Nobody but O’Brien could have written some of the opening vortexes about passion and meaning.… [Thomas H. Chippering] is wickedly realized. The agility and intelligence that created this pathos-ridden romantic make one marvel at Tim O’Brien’s gifts.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “You will laugh out loud, cringe with empathy, and close the book smiling, your head swirling with O’Brien’s witty use of language … a hilarious romp.”

  —Salt Lake City Tribune

  “O’Brien has gone out on a limb and readers will be hard-pressed not to scurry along after him.… Perhaps the biggest gamble O’Brien takes is to build such a hyperbolic story and set of characters and make them all as believable as his supremely gritty and realistic writing about Vietnam. Only a master realist could pull it off, and O’Brien is that.… Thomas [Chippering] not only becomes a tragic figure who elicits our pity, but one with universal implications.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Well-written and almost always amusing, Tomcat in Love is an entertaining book from a terrific writer.”

  —(Toronto) Globe and Mail

  “[Tim O’Brien] leaves the war behind for lust, laughs, and literary mastery.”

  —New York Post

  “The real question is how does Tim O’Brien make us empathize with his anti-hero? Try laugh-out-loud humor. Try playing with language with the skill of a consummate juggler. The result is a contemporary satire on human nature.”

  —Book Report

  “Chippering has an appreciation for what he calls ‘the looping circuitry of a well-told tale,’ and he takes us on a humorous journey. But it is not just a farcical romp, because his wanderings capture some of t
he tougher and more conflicted realities of the male heart.… Like good old Chippering, we are both tomcats and house cats, and we never know, from day to day, which one of these variations we will be.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Tomcat in Love claws its way into the reader’s affection.”

  —Syracuse Herald American

  “O’Brien, widely regarded for his more serious Vietnam fiction, takes a wry left turn with this book without losing an ounce of mastery over plot. This stray cat struts.”

  —Maxim

  “Enjoyable, moving, hilarious.… One of O’Brien’s many gifts as a writer—along with his fantastic ear for dialogue, his indelibly rendered characters, and his lyricism—is the way he makes his stories work. While O’Brien shows us Chippering grappling with what he wants to say, he also shows us the act and importance of story-making as well.… It is this allowance for complexity—even a celebration of it—that finally makes Tomcat in Love a remarkable and compelling novel.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Part romance, part academic farce complete with footnotes, Tomcat in Love is a dark and thoroughly engaging comedy about the danger of obsession and the healing power of love.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Bittersweet (with the emphasis on ‘bitter’) and hilarious.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “O’Brien is funny … a subtle and original stylist. But his story is simple: love is hard to find, hardest of all when you desperately need to find it.”

  —Booklist

  “Tom’s wit and buoyancy in the face of continual disaster (admittedly, of his own making) carry him and the novel to conclusion … hilarious.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Not since Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces has there been a character who is at once so repulsive and so engaging. Partly a dashing Don Juan, partly a gallant Don Quixote, and partly a WASPy Woody Allen in deep denial, Tom Chippering bumbles through one comic turn after another.… It’s a testament to O’Brien’s skill that he hooks you so deeply, you can’t stop reading.”

  —Sacramento Bee

  “Wildly funny, achingly poignant.… This time, instead of haunted soldiers or a politician with a secret past, O’Brien brilliantly explores the battle of the sexes—with all its fleeting victories, bone-crushing defeats, and endless skirmishing.… O’Brien has done a masterful job of depicting all those loose ends, those unmailed valentines, that final abiding question we have all, at one point or another, asked of the loved one who has left us behind.… Tomcat is also painfully human. And it is that humanness—that willingness to stoop to ridiculous levels in the name of love, that bewilderment in the face of betrayal—that finally makes him so appealing.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “[Chippering] is a delightfully unreliable narrator … a Don Juan for a modern equivocal age. Thanks to O’Brien’s craft and wit and storytelling bravado, Chippering is an astonishing comic creation.”

  —Time Out New York

  “If you approach Tim O’Brien’s Tomcat in Love with an open mind, with no preconceived notions, you’re likely to rave about this book.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  ‘Funny and touching.… Tomcat may be strange but he proves to be one of O’Brien’s more appealing characters.… Splendid fiction.”

  —Newark Star Ledger

  “You’d think O’Brien would be the last guy to attempt a comic novel, let alone get away with it. But Tomcat in Love is improbably successful … his skills translate well to the comic form.… It’s impossible not to be impressed with O’ Brien’s gifts.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Tomcat in Love is a funny book when it intends to be, but ultimately it’s not a comic book in the Philip Roth vein. It’s something new and wholly original. O’Brien shows us the quaking rage of jealousy, the deep eroticism of new love, and the ultimate despair of a failed relationship. Tomcat in Love is an unusual and unforgettable novel. No fooling.”

  —Orlando Sentinel Tribune

  “A risky, disturbing novel by one of our most significant post-Vietnam writers … this is a work of great pain and great fragility.… Tomcat in Love continues O’Brien’s movement away from traditional combat fiction and into the theme of warriors stranded in our midst. It is his edgiest, most flamboyant performance yet.… Chippering is not pleasant company and is not meant to be. As a result, O’Brien’s novel is bracing, frightening, excessive, annoying, insulting. It is also brilliant.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  “The long and horrific war in Vietnam has inspired much of Tim O’Brien’s greatest writing.… In his new novel, Tomcat in Love, the critically acclaimed storyteller turns to a conflict that’s been simmering even longer than the war in Vietnam: the battle between the sexes.… O’Brien makes a stylistic hairpin turn and crashes right into your funny bone in this laugh-a-minute look at a bewildered man’s tragicomic search for love in all the wrong places.”

  —Hartford Courant

  Books by Tim O’Brien

  If I Die in a Combat Zone

  Northern Lights

  Going After Cacciato

  The Nuclear Age

  The Things They Carried

  In the Lake of the Woods

  Tomcat in Love

  A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1998 by Broadway Books.

  TOMCAT IN LOVE. Copyright © 1998 by Tim O’Brien. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as:

  O’Brien, Tim, 1946-

  Tomcat in love / Tim O’Brien. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3565.B75T6 1998

  813′.54—dc21 98-29846

  Portions of this book appeared in The New Yorker.

  Grateful acknowledgment for:

  Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. © 1960, 1961

  (copyrights renewed) Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. All rights administered by Chappell & Co.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014.

  Excerpt from “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1972-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux., Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76293-1

  v3.1

  This is a work of the imagination, and the standard conventions are in force. These characters are wholly invented; these events are wholly fictitious.

  —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

  I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

  the art of losing’s not too hard to master

  though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

  —ELIZABETH BISHOP

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Faith

  2. Eighteen

  3. Tulip

  4. Roses

  5. Confession

  6. Substance

  7. Jungle

  8. Ned, Earleen, Velva

  9. Cat

  10. Performance

  11. Goof

  12. Predator

  13. Pontiac

  14. Virtue

  15. No/Yes

  16. Shell

  17. Tampa<
br />
  18. Lost

  19. Found

  20. Ledger

  21. Rain

  22. Twinkle

  23. Yes/No

  24. Noogies

  25. Fire

  26. Ring

  27. You

  28. Spot

  29. Nineteen

  30. Nerves

  31. Visitation

  32. Velocity

  33. The Fourth (Morning, Early Afternoon)

  34. Spider

  35. The Fourth (Late Afternoon, Evening)

  36. The Fourth (Late Night)

  37. Fiji

  About the Author

  I begin with the ridiculous, in June 1952, middle-century Minnesota, on that silvery-hot morning when Herbie Zylstra and I nailed two plywood boards together and called it an airplane. “What we need,” said Herbie, “is an engine.”

  The word engine—its meanings beyond mere meaning—began to open up for me. I went into the house and found my father.

  “I’ll need an engine,” I told him.

  “Engine?” he said.

  “For an airplane.”

  My father thought about it. “Makes sense,” he said. “One airplane engine, coming up.”

  “When?”

  “Soon enough,” said my father. “Pronto.”

  Was this a promise?

  Was this duplicity?

  Herbie and I waited all summer. We painted our airplane green. We cleared a runway in the backyard, moving the big white birdbath, digging up two of my mother’s rhododendrons. We eyed our plane. “What if it crashes?” I said.