About the same time he went to The New Yorker, his personal life blew up. "I was going through a breakup," he says, and that's when he decided to try his hand at novel-writing. "I was going to try to do a novel about this suburban community where I grew up; all these forests were cleared and these towns would just spring up. You're going to have an instant community. What's that like? I wrote 40 pages before I just stopped. I knew I was overmatched. I thought: Updike could do this one but not me.

"I had a writer friend who said, 'Why don't you write about what you're going through right now?' " he says, referring to his tentative dating. "Turn yourself into a test pilot."

The novel took several years to finish. "All along, it was about an actor and acting and the people he met through his cat," Wolcott maintains. But the story went through a number of revisions, and in its final form, the book starts with Johnny Downs discovering that his girlfriend is cheating on him when she should be feeding his cats while he's away on a trip. He turns to his confidante Darlene for advice on women, and she volunteers to guide him through the labyrinth of feminine psychology as he tries to turn himself into "husband material."

It's hard not to hear Wolcott's critical voice echoing behind Darlene's. "He had to be in the book somewhere, so I thought he was extremely clever to make himself into a sassy southern belle," Hirshey observes. "Or sassy southern ball-buster."

But it's also hard not to see Darlene (she turns out to be less self-assured and self-confident than she pretends to be) as a reflection of Wolcott's own divided persona: caustic wag on paper and mild-mannered homebody in person.

Which isn't to say that Darlene's advice on which party favors to put out at a get-together didn't work for Wolcott himself. "You thought he was the kind of guy who might never get married because he was such a loner," says Garrison. "Then you heard he was getting married and you think: Great! he's open to anything."

"My wife has a novel coming out where she has a chapter about how she outmaneuvered me," Wolcott says of fellow Vanity Fair writer Laura Jacobs, who married him nearly seven years ago. "Women are pros; men are amateurs."

Marriage, however, hasn't meant Wolcott has traded in the wallflower act. "I don't have this rich array of social contacts," he says. "I never see anybody." He and Jacobs live and work together at home. They don't socialize much with Manhattan's literati nor do they weekend in Litchfield County or the Hamptons. "We've got three cats," he says, as if that explained everything. "How could we go away for the weekends?"

Whatever the critical reaction to his novel, don't expect his former adversaries to pounce. The smart money says the Richard Fords and Kathryn Harrisons (Wolcott once dubbed Harrison and her novelist husband "the Sonny and Cher of dysfunction") won't want to seem petty or preoccupied with him by going after The Catsitters in print -- a fact borne out by the many demurrals I received when I called writers who had already taken whacks at him or been on the butt end of one of his bruising pistol-whippings.

To be sure, many of his harshest detractors claim not to care anymore. ("He hasn't featured in my nightmares in quite a long time," Fisketjon says.) But is the current conspiracy of silence any less retaliatory? After all, what's the worst thing you can do to a writer? Ignore him.

And now that he's gotten the novel out of his system, will a kinder, gentler Wolcott emerge? Don't hold your breath.

"I still feel like I'm in the back of a B-52 bomber, strapped to a machine gun," Walcott deadpans. "Which is fun."

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Marion Maneker
• Table of Contents: Jun 11, 2001 issue of New York | Subscribe!