Beer for the Kitten: A Heady Brew in Which to Toast the Pedagogues, Their Wives; In Which to Taste the Seductions of Higher Learning. Ladies and Gentlemen! The Faculty! Seen through a Glass, but Not Darkly

312 pp. Yes, in Beer for the Kitten, there is a cat named Gerald who is overweight, eats bacon, likes to visit a litter of red puppies at a neighbor's house, gets spanked when he licks the butter, but "it was worth it. (He was a hopeful cat)." There is a sex scene that does not involve the cat ("They were proud animals living in a feral world of their own, a world of pain and ecstasy"). The first cat-sipping-liquor scene comes on p. 55: "This was good stuff, better than milk. ('Cocktails, beer, wine - nothing's safe with Gerald about')." At various points it really seems that Gerald may take over the book, which wouldn't be a bad thing since it's not nearly as witty as the author's bio; one problem is that it's scattered among more characters than can easily be managed. The novel flogs its central metaphor most explicitly when one faculty husband watching Gerald happily lap up a saucer of beer observes that "We, the real teachers, are the kittens who drink beer. We don't have to be taught because we're built that way, like Gerald. The academic misfits are the ones who, not really liking beer, drink it because it's smart…. They'd be happier with a bowl of warm milk." He goes on to distinguish between the good kittens who "thrive on beer" and the lazy kittens who "lap at it and hate it because they're too weak and are afraid to compete with other kittens around the cream bowl." A typically prescient female catches him up by pointing out that his argument is going round and round "like a kitten chasing its tail." The book's defining moment comes when Gerald moves in with the family that has the red puppies. The significance of this move in the context of serious beer-drinking cats and pretenders is not as clear as it could be. There's a Princeton reference in this book, too. After someone asks what Princeton's like, someone who lived here says, "Not so hot. A pleasant place, lovely surroundings, a nice life with plenty of ice in the refrigerators at the graduate college and a pretty pipe organ you can play with rolls. But for the rest' Phooey!" - Town Topics