O'Brien's latest project nothing to swoon over

By Andrea Lynch

Tim O'Brien likes to write about the Vietnam War, and he writes about it really well. Luckily, he doesn't write the same book over and over again—from the quixotic magical realism of Going After Cacciato to the confessional brilliance of The Things They Carried to the cold delusion of In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien's literary development has led him outside of the war itself and into its effect on people's ability to continue with their lives after they're ended.

O'Brien's latest book, Tomcat in Love, only deals with Vietnam tangentially (his protagonist is a vet) but that's not really what the story is about. Or is it? If you plot Tomcat on the trajectory of O'Brien's career, you begin to realize that the author is up to his old thematic tricks, just in a more general way. Like his earlier works, Tomcat is about how people experience profound trauma and loss. Like his earlier works, it's about exploring the subtleties and contradictions of a single human soul. But there is one critical difference here: we forgive the pathology of O'Brien's soldiers because we believe in the legitimacy of their suffering, but try as I might, I can't bring myself to sympathize with his latest protagonist. Frankly, he's an asshole.

I wanted to like O'Brien's new book—really, I did. I read it in hardcover, for God's sake. But what O'Brien serves up here is little more than the tortured, 350-page interior monologue of a thoroughly unlikeable character. Tomcat opens just as Thomas Chippering's life has taken a turn for the worse—his wife, Lorna Sue, has left him for a tanned tycoon from Tampa, and Chippering, a linguistics professor at the University of Minnesota known more for his skirt-chasing than his scholarship, is determined to get even. As the book unfolds and we peel back the mystery of Chippering's divorce layer by layer, we begin to realize that we're not dealing with the most reliable of narrators. Chippering's a compulsive talker and a dictatorial narrator; he justifies everything he says, explains himself to death, and tells stories with excessive attention to detail. Oh, yeah—he's also a liar.

Once again, the tomcat is up to his old rhetorical tricks. O'Brien's an old hand at stretching truth to its narrative limits—much of The Things They Carried, which many would argue is his chef d'oeuvre, is a careful examination of the role the truth plays in the telling of a story. In the Lake of the Woods takes a similar tack—it's about a man who may or may not have murdered his wife (he can't remember).

But the narrative unreliability falls flat in Tomcat because we feel manipulated rather than challenged. The lying is also problematic because we're dealing with a first-person narrative, and a verbose one at that. Chippering's voice is beyond grating—he's obsequious, insecure, and self-conscious. He tells graphic, meandering childhood stories, recounts frustrated encounters with a whole host of women, pontificates endlessly on the associations he has for certain words. It's like a 37-chapter phone conversation with someone who won't shut up. Lest we forget for a whole three pages that Chippering is a linguist, O'Brien harps on the theme of language until the reader can bear it no longer—we get it, Tim, language is slippery and elusive and words are building blocks in the construction of lies and misinterpretations. Now stop it and write a good story like we all know you can.

What makes Tomcat so frustrating is that O'Brien seems to have lost faith in his readers's ability to trace his themes. The Things They Carried is powerfully direct, but it's never obvious or heavy-handed. In the Lake of the Woods is mysterious because O'Brien never tells you if his character is delusional or just manipulative—he lets you decide for yourself. But Tomcat reads like the cold testimony of a sociopath who's convinced he doesn't have a problem and positive he can manipulate you into thinking the same. O'Brien's voice has always been laced with bitterness, but the vitriol used to be cut with vulnerability. Take the tenderness away and you're left with rage, which does not make for a fun read. O'Brien's characteristic proximity to his audiene—his ability to make you feel like you're having a conversation instead of reading a book—becomes claustrophobic and creepy. A chronic flirt, Chippering even goes so far as to make a move on his reader toward the middle of the book. It's an unwelcome advance, to say the least.

O'Brien's an elusive author, moving from fantasy to reality to memory with exceptional skill. But like Chippering, he's also a compulsive teller—he doesn't strike you as the kind of author who "writes for fun"; rather, he writes to stay alive. Vietnam is a demon O'Brien must continually exorcise, and for this reason, all of his books have a cathartic feeling. O'Brien admitted to an audience of readers in Cambridge, Mass. that he had no control over Chippering—the character just wanted out. He even went so far as to apologize for the unpleasantness of his protagonist. Apology accepted, but I'm hoping now that O'Brien's got Chippering out of his system, he'll go back to writing stuff I want to read.

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