The Bachelor's Cat: A Love Story

Call us Scrooge, but the purported charm of this slim tale, which the publisher predicts will be ""this year's holiday bestseller,"" eludes us entirely. After the arch opening sentence (""Once upon a time, there was a bachelor... a difficult and romantic man...""), the attenuated plot describes the way the bachelor comes to adopt a stray cat, his introduction to the feline world of play and affection, and how the cat somehow leads him to choose between his chic, sexy but fickle girlfriend (nameless and always referred to as ""the girlfriend"" ) and a new woman in his life (""the woman""), who is smart , funny and nurturing but--gasp!--fat. Exactly how the act of owning and playing games with the cat teaches him the values of true love is both obscured by inflated prose and rendered laughable by the protagonist's awed reaction to such old-cat tricks as the bat-the-sock routine. Moreover, a reliance on cute effects (to the frightened cat, the sound of a door opening is The Click of Doom), makes one's teeth grit. Investing the story with mythic meaning, Hoffman provides a deus ex machina accident involving the cat that blows away ""the fog of the bachelor's numbness"" and signals the right choice in his love life. Make that ""dumbness"" and you hit the nail on the head. (Nov.)