About the Book
 

A Brief Description from the Publisher

Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally-notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme to buy a run-down clamboat and re-invent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the bayside town of Babbington, Long Island.  But after they’ve bought the boat, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking. Each night he sneaks from his home to the harbor and pumps the boat dry, inflating his mother’s hopes a bit longer.

raft’s multivolume chronicles of Peter Leroy (Leaving Small’s Hotel, 1998, etc.) continue with this often hilarious bittersweet tale of adolescence recollected in tranquility; middle-aged Peter’s fictional improvement on the subject of his mother Ella’s checkered career as an independent businesswoman.
     In a kaleidoscopic narrative that’s a little like a marriage of Marcel Proust and Mark Twain, Peter (a former teacher and author of a series of boys’ adventure books) treats his long-suffering wife Albertine (who’s his best critic) to a fantasized version of growing up absurd in the clam-rich municipality of Babbington, Long Island.  Specifically, he imagines that the determined Ella found her commercial niche catering “elegant excursions” aboard her newly purchased clam boat (whose previous owner had neglected to mention that the vessel leaked).  The story also fulfills 13-year-old Peter’s fantasy needs in the person of schoolmate sexpot (and the Leroys’ collaborator) Patti Fiorenza.  That’s about it—and it’s enough, in a charmingly loopy come-in-and-sit-a-spell tale that segues comfortably among past and present, truth and lies, the main point and ingenuous digressions, including explications of technical matters that stimulate Peter’s urge to tinker with everything he touches (not excluding Ms. Fiorenza).  One particularly impassioned chapter is presented as a playlet.  Interpolated explanatory ones employ illustrations and diagrams to dwell on such nautical arcana as “The Mysteries of the Jet Pump Revealed” and “Morphology and Aesthetics of Clam Boats.”  The title metaphor, as explained in an epigraph from Don Quixote, assumes several risible forms, and Peter’s determination to explore all the mysteries of environment, heredity, and (especially) sex is memorably expressed in such deadpan wonders as the episode entitled “Martinis with the Merry Widow” and “a doo-wop version of Stanza XI of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Esthetique du Mal.’”  And Kraft wraps it up with a fabulous final chapter in which Peter says his final farewell to the redoubtable Ella.
     Glorious stuff.  Is there no end to the (obviously autobiographical, irresistibly entertaining) permutations of Peter Leroy?  Let’s hope not.

1. Inflating a Dog
Eric Kraft

The latest installment in the ever-expanding meta-novel of the life of Peter Leroy is a loving portrait of his mother, which is to say Kraft’s loving portrait of his mother.

This dual biography rings with the lure of music as well as the melancholy heart of frail beings.

A tale rich with hijinks, humor and dignity, as well as travails, fractious circumstances, deceit and sadness—in short, it is imbued with the same substance that empowers its core subject: the blues.

Barry’s best yet, as she questions a lifetime of often-conflicted impulses, urges and desires common to us all. I must also note that my daughter Norabelle shows up in one of the chapters as a real character, though that in no way changes the truth of my previous statement.

Third in this annual series draws from writings on hiphop, jazz, country, rock and some hard-to-classify roots and branches. Highpoints include “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit” by R.J. Smith and “A Long Strange Trip,” Michael Hall’s sad but honorable portrait of Roky Erickson.

Warner Bros. was an oasis of honest, innovative and lasting music from the late ’60s through the ’70s, and Stan Cornyn gleefully spun in the midst of it all, heading up what was loosely called Creative Services. It’s a testament to Cornyn and Scanlon that the former’s innate wit and charm comes shining through over the course of this rather lengthy tome.

Short and sweet, here’s a few samples: “Glib Repeater” (Peter Gabriel), “Matured? No, unable” (Madonna True Blue) and “ELP release a gross, dreary album. Mankind ran!” (Emerson, Lake and Palmer Brain Salad Surgery).

he following interview was conducted by Betsy Gaskell, who writes the column that appears in the Babbington Reporter under the rubric “We Pay a Call” and the pseudonym Egbert Penman.

Penman: Like all your other books, Inflating a Dog pretends to be a volume in the continuing memoirs of Peter Leroy, and it begins with a preface in which Leroy explains that most of what follows contradicts the facts.  Why do you begin your books that way?

Kraft: Peter is like any other memoirist in his tendency to stray from the facts, to embellish his memories, to bend the truth when it suits him to do so, but he is unlike all but a very few other memoirists in his willingness, even eagerness, to confess to the reader that he has done what he has done.  Perhaps, in a way, he’s bragging a bit in those prefaces, pointing out to the reader how malleable the past is under his hands, how he can shape it as a sculptor shapes clay.

Penman: That explains why Peter Leroy begins his books with prefaces, but it doesn’t explain why you begin Peter's books with prefaces.

Kraft: Having Peter Leroy write a preface is a way for me to hint at my reasons for writing fiction rather than memoir.  I write fiction with autobiographical facts in it rather than memoir with self-serving lies in it because, like Peter, I find that when I reminisce I’m as interested in the possibilities as the facts.  For me, the unimagined life is as worthless a life as the unexamined one.  I’m an honest guy, though, and if I’m going to take all the liberties that imagination tempts me to take, then I’m not going to pretend that I’ve stuck to the facts.

Penman: Yet you said that you write fiction with autobiographical facts in it, so you must have stuck to some of the facts.  What are some of the autobiographical facts in Inflating a Dog?

Kraft: Well, I once owned a clamboat like the one that Ella buys, and my boat, like hers, sank.  A friend and I bought the boat together, hoping that we could earn our college expenses by clamming, and we were swindled, much as Ella and Peter are in the book.  Let’s see . . . what else?  I had a mother . . .

Penman: She didn’t try to turn a clamboat into an elegant excursion vessel did she?

Kraft: No, but she did have the entrepreunerial urge.  She ran several small businesses from our suburban house—a catering business and a beauty shop, among others—and my memory of her catering business inspired Ella’s affection for tiny cocktail sandwiches on tinted bread.  Another thing that my mother gave to Ella was her desire to do something that would make her into someone she could admire—not merely to spend her life doing what was required, and so be limited to thinking of herself as a housewife, but to do something that would allow her to think of herself as a somebody, even if it was only on a local scale.  I have to admit that my motive in writing this book resembles Peter’s, as he describes it in his preface: it is in part a memorial to my mother and in part a memorial to her dreams, her ambitions.

Penman: Peter’s mother is not the only woman in the book.  There is another, a girl . . .

Kraft: Patti Fiorenza.

Penman: Is she another autobiographical fact?

Kraft: Everything in fiction has its ultimate inspiration in the experience of the author, but the author’s experience includes the author’s experience of his developing fiction, so, if a character has any fictional life at all, she begins to assert herself, to separate herself from the remembered original and become her own woman.  That’s what has happened with Patti.  Long ago, I may have borrowed parts of remembered girls to make her, but over the years, in the course of her several appearances in the Peter Leroy series, she’s become a character quite different from the rough drafts that life provided for me.

Penman:  “The rough drafts that life provided.”  I have the feeling that for you all of life is a rough draft.

Kraft: I couldn't have put it better myself.

You'll find more swell ideas from Candi Lee here.

Copyright © 2001 by Eric Kraft

Inflating a Dog 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 author. 

Picador USA will publish Inflating a Dog in the summer of 2002.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail Kraft’s indefatigable agent, Alec “Nick” Rafter.

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.