It can't be said that Chippering is an appealing character.

It is an iffy proposition to let Chippering tell his own story.

How could Thomas Chippering come to deserve a pleasant fate?

Funny stuff, but we get to see it only through the drifting mist of Chippering's self-serving rhetoric.

What O'Brien relies on for effect is Chippering's sense of language.

Pleasant fates are reserved, in the main, for characters with charm, of which Chippering has precious little.

Thomas Henry Chippering - Narrator and protagonist of the novel.

Chippering has been to Vietnam.

Thomas Chippering is a bore.

Chippering is obsessive about proper use of the English language, and employs many examples of wordplay.

Tim O'Brien, an experienced novelist if ever there was one, almost lets Chippering get away with it.

"I'm afraid some people are going to say that Chippering is such a sexist pig that O'Brien must be one," the author said.

Written in the first person, the tale unfolds with extensive use of flashback (what Chippering would insist be called "analepsis") and foreshadowing.

Vietnam, though, is just a bit of business for both O'Brien and his protagonist, Thomas H. Chippering.

His narrator, Thomas H. Chippering, the novel's "tomcat in love," is a Vietnam veteran who has become a professor of linguistics at a small college.

Yes, I softened toward Chippering, and a little forgiveness on the part of the reader is a comforting feeling, especially to the reader, and goes a long way.

His acoustics pick up the persistent immemorial breath of the Eye winds and higher, a chippering, a rustic of frantic scurryings as small things scatter before him.

As part of his irrational reaction to the end of his marriage, Thomas Chippering returns to his (fictitious) home town, Owago, Minnesota.

Chippering is always thinking about her, but only as a talking icon, a figure who takes on meaning only as she represents certain needs, met or unmet, in Chippering's psyche.

Important scenes are somewhat more transparently rendered - Chippering gets trussed by two hookers and ends up telling his Vietnam story to a janitor, who allows him to do so only if he mops the floors.

A student first extorts her senior thesis out of Chippering, then betrays him to the university administration when she and her room-mate have a falling-out over divvying up the sexual favors of the football team.

Chippering is spanked in front of his lecture class by Lorna Sue's new husband and her brother, who is Chippering's oldest friend, the only male friend he's ever had, in fact.

For this reader, in fact, O'Brien skated very close to the edge with Chippering, made him almost too insufferable to bear, but then would do a little plot pirouette or a stylistic flourish that would keep me going.

Tomcat in Love is a novel by Tim O'Brien, about the misadventures of a womanizing linguistics Professor, Thomas H. Chippering, originally published in hardcover by Broadway Books, in 1998.

Thus it is that Mrs. Robert Kooshof absolutely needs an actress to play her, just so we could see her for ourselves, see what it is about her life or Chippering's physique that keeps her interested.