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Thursday, April 16, 2015

Book Review: Tomcat in Love by Tim O'Brien

I was never really a fan of reading or writing fiction until I stumbled upon the author Tim O'Brien in college. The first book I read was The Things They Carried, I read it for my English 1102 class. I enjoyed the book so much that I decided to buy and read the rest of the books by Tim O'Brien.

Tim O'Brien has a common theme connecting every one of his novels. Every novel he wrote is connected to the Vietnam War. The Things They Carried, Going after Cacciato, and If I Die in a Combat Zone are all directly related to the war while his other novels use the war as a back story.

Tomcat in Love, The Nuclear Age, July July, Northern Lights, and In the Lake of the Woods focus more on the characters that fought in the war rather than the war itself. You get a lot of character development out of his stories.

Tomcat in Love is a story about a guy whose thirstiness for love and affection gets him into a worse and worse situation as the novel progresses. It is quite painful as it is like watching a freight train head straight towards a cliff. And then the train flies off the cliff and crashes into the jagged rocks below into a twisted mess of blood, fire, and steel.

The novel starts off with Thomas's wife Lorena leaving him. The two had a strained marriage as Lorena was very cold to Thomas. Desperate for affection, Thomas kept a ledger of all the attention that he received from any woman through out the day. If he received a smile, or a wink, or a hug, he would record it in this ledger. Upon discovery of the ledger, Lorena leaves Thomas for some rich tycoon.

Feeling devastated about the end of a marriage, Thomas tries to cope the best he can but eventually decides to plot to try to destroy Lorena's new marriage to this tycoon. After a few chapters, Thomas meets a new love interest named Mrs. Robert Kooshof. Thomas and Mrs. Robert Kooshof hook up a few times but Thomas is still determined to destroy the marriage of Lorena. Mrs. Robert Kooshof experiences frustration that Thomas can't put his past behind him.

As the novel progresses, Thomas continuously gets screwed over by the women that he meets and gets attracted to. Thomas is a linguistics professor and ends up getting blackmailed to ghost write for one of his students. This incident ends up causing Thomas to lose his job. Towards the end of the book, he also gets blackmailed by a four year old daughter to pretend to be a space captain on some local children television show.

All this could have been avoided if he just decided to drop the revenge and stay with Mrs. Robert Kooshof. Eventually, Thomas suffers a mental breakdown before getting his closure. The book does end happily with Thomas and Mrs. Robert Kooshof moving to an island together.

Before I ever heard about the red pill, I knew that getting to addicted to someone's love and affection could lead to some disastrous results. Tomcat in Love is a comical representation of that happening. It also serves as a warning to not become the kind of thirsty man that is desperate for love and affection from another. Love and affection is nice, but getting dependent on it can lead to nasty results.

A final takeaway can be found it how difficult it can be for someone to let go of the past. While reading the novel, I kept on thinking that Thomas could be happy if he just decided to let the old woman go and enjoy the company of Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

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