N ASIDE on the subject of the compulsion to tell a story.  When, as a small child, I couldn’t get to sleep at night, my mother, after she tired of reading to me or just talking with me in the dark, used to tell me, “Make up a story for yourself.”  Latterly, I find that the child’s solution has become the adult’s problem, and I now have to figure out how to stop making up stories so that I can get to sleep.

ANOTHER ASIDE, on shells as a concept.  I promised myself that I would resist the temptation to elaborate here the parallels between the mansion’s shell and the shell of a clam, but I find that I have to say, at least, “Hey, look: the mansion’s shell, sheltering and protecting the fragile hope that the future would hold an interesting life, would bring more stories, is very like the clam’s shell, sheltering and protecting the clam itself, which has always seemed to me to be a creature very much like hope: soft, vulnerable, chewy, tasty.”

The precocity of Mr. Kraft’s narrator mirrors the audacity of the novel itself.

At Home with the Glynns is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin’s Press, at $11.00.

You should be able to find At Home with the Glynnsat your local bookstore, but you can also order it by phone from:

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
Book Call at 1-800-255-2665 (worldwide 1-203-966-5470)

At Home with the Glynns is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.