The story is said to be based on Theroux's years of teaching at Longwood University, and places described in the book are easily recognized buildings on the campus.

Instead, he discovers a passion for words and writing and is further encouraged in his aspiration to become a writer by his grandmother when he moves to her house in Venice.

Isabel fails in her freshman year and has to leave Quinsy, taking a position as a telephone operator in Charlottesville.

The romance has also interfered with the writing of his book, Rumpopulorum, “a grimoire, in the old style” (p. 5) dealing with angels and similar metaphysical entities and their relation to man.

She has found a new lover, a son of the well-to-do van der Slang family of Dutch background she had known since childhood.

“All forgetfulness… was in itself immoral, for the permanence with which experiences stay with a man is proportional to the significance they had for him: memory must be preserved from time” (p. 677).

[3] The reader will encounter countless new and unknown words, but "(u)se your definitionary … It is one of the last few pleasures left in life," so the advice of the protagonist when trying to teach the class about Keats' Bright Star (p. 56).

Darconville’s Cat has been named a work of "obvious excess" and "a literary game of the Nabokovian kind".

The novel contains 100 chapters of all forms of style including essay, diary, poem, sermon, invocation, satire, fable, travelogue, catalogue, meditation, list, precis, and pages mirrored or black.

[1] It was also nominated for a National Book Award and made the Good Reads list of the 100 Top Literary Novels of All Time.

"[5] Tom LeClair calls it a book of "obvious excess"[4] and Steven Moore places it in the genre of "huge, erudite novels".

"[8] Doug Nufer writes that "(w)ith its dazzling vocabulary, play of different voices, and a profusion of forms, Darconville's Cat is a 700-page showcase of ornate and meticulous syntax, in a variety of styles and modes, mixing the natural with the supernatural and romantic fantasy with cynical satire".