Tyger At The Net

Tyger At The Net: The Quest For Meaning, is a novel that tells the story of 17 year old Edgar Delano Goldberg, who turns down Harvard to embark on a "quest for meaning" when his best friend commits suicide after Edgar rejects his sexual overture.

The novel is related by three narrators, each of whom plays tennis, the symbol that binds the novel together.

There is an Epilogue, which takes place in a tennis-playing Heaven and culminates in the Ultimate Tennis Match between Good (Edgar) and Evil (the villain Tiger O'Toole) to determine the fate of the Universe. God is the UU (Ultimate Umpire) but drops dead of a heart attack, leaving Heaven in a state of anarchy until Edgar becomes the new God and "creates a new heaven and a new earth."

The first portion of the novel is narrated by Edgar, who meets the 27 year old Panayatta Popodopolous at the Manhattan Chess Club (chess is another recurring symbol that binds the stories together). Panayatta is a ranking tennis player, heir to the Popodopolous shipping fortune, and is working toward a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University.

Panayatta has set up a utopia based on Plato's Republic on an Aegean Island and Edgar joins him, hoping to fulfill his quest there. Here Edgar meets 'Bama O'Keefe, Panayatta's fiancé, whom Edgar falls in love with. He also meets and falls in love with the African-American Peewee McGee, a ranking tennis player.

The second narrator is Tiger O'Toole, the ultimate in villainy. Delivered to a Catholic orphanage in Dublin while still a baby, he becomes the sex object of Fathers Kelly and Doyle until, at the age of 10, he bursts the religious fetters they bind him with. Although his sexuality is now warped, his intellectual growth and chess skills have been given a head start by the priests and nuns.

He spends the next year (from age 10 to age 11), with the prostitute Mabel Doherty, whom he seduces as she attempts to mother him. She acquaints him with great poetry and furthers his chessmanship.

Tiger then leaves Mabel to go with Lord William Seaton, a bisexual customer of hers, a tennis buff, and a member of Parliament. Before he departs from Mabel's, Tiger strangles her six cats with six of her many crucifixes. (He leaves them on the cats.) Then he steals Mabel's life's savings.