I am a huge O'Brien fan. This is Tim swinging & missing.

The concept is a bit juvenile and the telling of it, while brilliant and funny at times, is loaded with sophomoric, cartoonist behavior from the main protagonist and no redeeming co-star to save the mess.

When somebody writes great sentences you can abide with a few bad paragraphs, when that creeps to bad pages, then to bad chapters, you are best to call it a day, which I did halfway through.

I fully expected to like this book because I’ve enjoyed a couple of O’Brien’s other works, but I finally gave up on Tomcat in Love around page 200. It is a laborious read, and the two major characters are insufferable.

As the narrator and main character, Thomas Chippering, is clearly pompous, narcissistic, and delusional. Apparently, many readers find him to be wickedly funny as well, but I completely miss the humor. To me, Thomas is little more than an excruciating bore (with pretty creepy tendencies), and I couldn’t tolerate him a minute longer. How Mrs. Robert Kooshof, his co-conspirator and eager paramour, convinces herself he is a suitable life companion, is beyond me. It seems O’Brien wants us to find their relationship endearing in some way, like we would an archetypal TV sitcom marriage: Thomas, the reckless, boorish husband; Mrs. Kooshof, the abiding, long-suffering wife. She patiently stands by her man because she has the special ability to understand that underneath his evasiveness, his lies, his manipulation, his neuroses, his self-absorption, and his emotional unavailability, she knows is a man with whom she can live happily ever after.

O’Brien’s attempts to establish this dynamic, and the humor to sustain it, fail. Beyond her physical attributes (mentioned frequently), Mrs. Kooshof's no great catch. It’s as difficult to accept her as the stabilizing figure of the novel as it is to accept him as the hilarious antihero. While Thomas is a pedantic pain in the neck, Mrs. Kooshof is a desperate flunky who'd latch on to any man she found in her yard. Frankly, they didn’t make me laugh, they only irritated me.

Needless to say, I didn’t feel at all inspired to continue reading the entire book. I admit, though, that I skimmed the last few pages as a reward for my efforts. O’Brien finally fleshes out Herbie and Lorna Sue, who both were two-dimensional throughout most of the novel (all other characters remain either cartoonish or flat). This was a pleasant surprise, but how he concludes with Chippering and Mrs. Kooshof is entirely predictable.
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In the end, another Vietnam tragedy. A girl- crazed adolescent turned professor. A brilliant professor decomposing his life. The all consuming horrors of war nibbling away at sanity. As with all comedies, the dark side can easily prevail. I was a little lost in the middle of his craziness, which was hilarious, but I hung in there finally loving the book and the author's wonderful use of the English language.

I'll admit it -- I loved the first half of this book, and progressively lost interest in the narrator's voice. After finishing May We Be Forgiven, I realize there are dozens of similarities between these two, and Homes' novel got me where I wanted much faster. I'm sure there's a thesis or at least a really good book review in comparing these two titles, but I'll let someone else do it. I love that O'Brien took such a risk in writing in a tone so different from what we usually expect from him, but I love him for his Vietnam work, and The Things They Carried remains my favorite of his, and one of my favorite war stories of all time.

Very funny at times, lots of verbal pyrotechnics, and a semi-lovable, semi-reliable narrator - it's not Swann in Love but it holds its own. Beware though, it's definitely a rant, and a sustained one at that, so the one-track tone can get a just a bit tedious at times. O'Brien makes up for it with snazzy construction and a bluffer of an ending.

Tim O'Brien's prose is effortless. This couldn't have been an easy story to control, but he makes it look easy. I was 50 pages in before I even realized it. As with many novels that are declared in their cover blurbs to be "wildly funny," I might say that Tomcat in Love is quirky rather than truly funny. The protagonist is a middle-aged University of Minnesota linguistics professor (wordplay is BIG for this character) who earnestly teaches seminars on "Methods of Misogyny" while simultaneously subjecting his female students to sexual harassment. He was decorated for valor in the Vietnam War; he is irresistible to women of all ages; and the love of his life, his wife of two decades, has recently left him for another man, dismissing his emotional devastation with an ice cold, "Grow up. Don't be an 18-year-old." As his life -- both personally and professionally -- spirals out of control, the reader quickly discovers that he is an absolutely unreliable -- and vaguely despicable -- narrator and it isn't until the final chapters that the truer nature of his personality is more fully revealed. It's not too late by then, but it might be too little... I find myself thinking about his future and wondering if he'll be able to sustain a happy ending.

Everything O'Brien writes is amazing. Fight me.

I picked this up on Friday intending to read 50 pages or so and I wound up reading well over half the book in one sitting. It was thoroughly enjoyable. A narrator you love to hate, dark humor, lots of great wordplay. I met Tim O'Brien in a writing class in college, but I hadn't read too much of him because most of his stuff is centered around war, which is not favorite topic of interest. But I do believe after this book I may have to give some of his others a shot.

I read this in Italy. It is a pretty awful book. The main character is despicable. I think that I had tried to read it years ago and wisely gave up. I love the other two Tim O'Brien books I read.

This guy. In the beginning, you believe that he’s this angel that was stabbed in the heart by his one true love, but then you realize that this guy is a weirdo. And so is his ex-wife and her whole family, though that may be a mental illness. His new fiancee is dumb. I think the reader “you” he refers to is actually his fiancée, Donna and that he leaves her for the redhead (maybe he met her braiding her hair). He knows that she will read the book, because she asks him if he’s writing while they are in Fiji. He is known for being flirty. Hm.

Original e desconcertante!

Baffling. Not O'Brien's best work but still very readable, I never could figure out if this was supposed to comedy or serious.