Books: Gallico Cat

THOMASINA (288 pp.)—Paul Gallico—Doubleday ($3.95).

A cat is a cat is a cat

Neither human nor divine—

Like the plant of Miss Gertrude Stein

Which was, as everybody knows,

Neither more nor less than that—A rose.

Paul Gallico has written a highly sentimental novel about a cat—and there is no one quite so sentimental as a 200-lb. ex-sportswriter (a type who can weep real tears over a carload of redundant wrestlers). Gallico's cat Thomasina should go down in literary history as an outstanding example of the pathetic fallacy, i.e., the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman objects....