Flying

"Eric Kraft is an oddball, an eccentric, a bit of a genius—the writerly equivalent of a dreamer who puts together weird and wonderful contraptions in his garage. For almost 30 years, and through many books, he has been crafting The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy, a series of fictions framed as memoir, or maybe they're just fictionalized memoir, bits of life seen in a dizzying metafictional mirror. Reading these books and trying to figure out where Kraft stops and Leroy begins is part of the mystery here, and part of the fun. 'The usual descriptions—author and character, ventriloquist and dummy, left brain and right brain—are inaccurate and inadequate,' Kraft has said, muddying the waters with typical playfulness. 'He calls me Peter Leroy. I call him Eric Kraft. He thinks he invented me. I think I invented him.' Kraft puts on Leroy the way Charlie Chaplin used to don the tramp suit. Kraft plays the clown, but something essential and transformative is also at stake. His latest book Flying collects a new work, Flying Home, with the previously published Taking Off and On The Wing to complete a trilogy that examines and refracts a loony adventure from Leroy's adolescence—the time he built a flying motorcycle, an 'aerocycle,' and used the machine for a cross-country trip from Long Island to New Mexico. The exploit led to the fame that the young Leroy craved, and thereafter he was known in his hometown as the 'Birdboy of Babbington,' 'the teenage hero' of 'a cozy bayside community.' In fact, an older Leroy now reveals, this celebrity grew and continued out of mistake, a fraud almost—the sad reality being that the aerocycle never did get airborne but chugged along on the ground. Flying interweaves Leroy's giddy tall-tale telling of what might or might not actually have happened (with Leroy, an unreliable narrator par excellence, we're never quite sure) with the story of how he and his wife Albertine set out to retrace the route he took all those years ago. For the purpose of this second trip a new car is required, or rather, demanded (by the loyal, lovely and willful Albertine), prompting a Leroy trademark, the digression. This one concerns the couple's history with snazzy, speedy, yet somehow always malfunctioning automobiles that are like 'driving inside a hi-fi speaker during a fuzz bass solo.' 'We had in those days a naïve belief that somewhere there was a reliable British sports car that we could purchase, used, for a reasonable price. Perhaps that belief seems ludicrous to you. Perhaps you cannot imagine that two intelligent young people—which we then were—could labor under such an absurd delusion. If you feel that way, I just want to inform you—or remind you—that a large segment of the population of the United States believes that the sun revolves around the earth,' he says. 'As we traded in, we traded up. We would rid ourselves of one limping sports car and promptly buy another that was more powerful, more expensive, and more difficult to keep running. We always had an automobile loan, and the balance kept increasing. Little by little, we progressed from one of the most basic sports cars, a Benson-Greeley Gnome, to one of the most sophisticated, the powerful Kramler.' It's a hilarious passage, and a clue, perhaps, to the Kraft/Leroy relationship. The reality-based wit—'limping sports car'—feels like it might come from observation, from Kraft's own life, whereas the soaring madcap verbal fantasy of that splendid 'Benson-Greeley Gnome' is pure Leroy. Flying abounds in such dizzying moments, writing that looks easy enough but in most writers' hands falls to Earth with a clunk and a thud. Kraft has made his career out of high-wire performance, seizing on the merest hint or detail and spinning it into magic. 'Everywhere in our path lay items awaiting salvage,' says Leroy, describing a nighttime visit to a wrecker's yard in the hunt for motorcycle parts. 'Junk, one might say, but why demean it by calling it that? What should properly be called junk, I think, is only what is useless, nothing more than trash, but what surrounded us in such looming profusion was useful stuff.' For this writer there is no junk. Everything is grist in the mill of a transformative prose that sometimes can recall Proust or Nabokov, and at others the British humorists P.G. Wodehouse and J.B. Morton (better known as 'Beachcomber'). 'Extrapolating from my experience with food back at home, I guessed that this was a stew of some kind,' writes Leroy, describing a ghastly meal from his youth. Regular visitors to the alternate realities conjured by Kraft/Leroy will recognize familiar tics and tropes: There are the usual mocked-up ads and parodies of magazine articles; there are frequent visits to dotty hotels, motels and boarding houses as well as farcical encounters with the people who inhabit them; there is a willfully rambling structure that encompasses a nostalgia for failed technologies and inventions and a satirical, albeit affectionate, concern for the dreamy craziness of ordinary America. Flying, though episodic, has a pleasing coherence and sweep, and feels like Kraft's grandest achievement since Herb 'n' Lorna (in which Leroy discovered that his grandparents had been the manufacturers of intricate, and functioning, erotic jewelry). Memory is a unifying theme—the idea of how memory can both trap us into who we are and yet cut us free from the tugs of gravity and the quotidian. Above all, though, Flying reads like a love story. The dreamy yearnings of Leroy's adolescence are given perspective and counterpoint by the reader's insight into the love we know he will find, and melancholy by our recognition that one day, in one way or another, this love will be lost. The idea of life without Albertine sends Leroy into a panic, and the two of them together on the page come off with the reckless panache and sparkle of Nick and Nora Charles in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. Leroy: 'I've been reflecting on my role in this adventure.' Albertine: 'Are we having an adventure?' Leroy: 'Life is an adventure.' Albertine: 'Not when I'm on line at the pharmacy.'"—Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times

"Kraft's characters don't talk like people actually talk. They're more witty, more astute, and they express themselves with infinitely more pizazz. This is true even of Peter's winged steed, the charmingly anthropomorphized Spirit of Babbington, which may not be an ace at lifting off but proves a surprisingly excellent road buddy. The effect is like a happy-go-lucky Nabokov, with all the road-tripping wordplay and none of the incest . . . On paper, a novel about hope, nostalgia, love, disillusionment, pataphysics and the science of lift might seem like a hopelessly overdetermined bucket of bolts, an aerodynamic impossibility. But Kraft's affectionately satirical, buoyant language makes Flying soar."—Radhika Jones, Time

"A hilarious and masterfully told tale."—St. Petersburg Times

"This comedic novel explores the diverging reality and myth of the adventures of a young man who builds a flying motorcycle in the 1950s and takes off cross country and how he returns home years later to tell the true story of his trip."—Jeff Cretan, New York Press

"With Flying, Eric lighter-than-air Kraft barnstorms several miles above where most writers' imaginations dare to ascend."—Ed Park, author of Personal Days

"This delightful omnibus volume includes three novels: the previously published Taking Off and On the Wing and the never before published Flying Home, which  completes the adolescent adventure of Krafts serial alter ego character Peter Leroy—aka the 'Bird Boy of Babbington.'  Flying Home revisits the 1950s, when Peters 'flight' from Long Island to New Mexico via a home-made 'aerocycle' (which, in truth, only 'taxied' at virtual ground level) made him a local celebrity—and also shows him in the near-present, now in his 60s, resigned to tell the unromantic truth about his adventure. Were also made privy to his youthful experiences at a most unconventional institution of, uh, higher learning: the Summer Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry (SIMPaW), a precariously dangling branch of the New Mexico Institute of Agriculture, Technology, and Pharmacy. This southwestern Arcadia is a breeding ground for miscellaneous young geniuses and crackpots, and a vehicle, some might say, for Krafts deadpan reworking of the imaginary discipline of 'pataphysics' concocted by super-eccentric surrealist author Alfred Jarry. SIMPaWs inspired simulations of applied science are nicely juxtaposed with Peters abovementioned later return home, accompanied by his unflappably cool and comforting spouse Albertine, as he scrambles for a palatable explanation of his 'lies,' which may discourage Babbington from exploiting his local fame as the main attraction of a tourist-friendly theme park . . . the tomfoolery retains its power to charm, and Peters habit of 'mental traveling' . . . adds up to something like a Proustian exploration of the phenomenon of memory."—Kirkus Reviews

"Once again, wizardly Kraft mixes boy-wonder high jinks with metaphysical musings, tall tales, and true love in a zany, heart-lifting escape from the everyday."—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Krafts protagonist through 12 novels, the memoirist Peter Leroy is both an egoist and an egotist who by all rights should be a crashing bore, but his curious idiosyncrasies, strange perspectives, and satirical wit render him fascinating. His ego is held somewhat in check by his wryly brilliant wife, Albertine, and their pithy, erudite conversations resemble those of a markedly hornier William Powell and Myrna Loy. The account of a mostly fraudulent 'aerocycle' voyage to and from Long Island, New York, to a summer institute for potential spies in New Mexico by 15-year-old Peter around 1960 alternates with the tale of Peter and Albertine retracing the voyage in the present day. Both voyages could be described as picaresques, featuring a delightful variety of odd hostelries and characters. Kraft employs actual and altered illustrations and advertisements from popular science magazines from the 1930s through the 1950s to hilarious effect . . . recommended for academic libraries."—Jim Dwyer, Library Journal

"This chunky paperback collects Flying Home, the final installment to Kraft's Flying trilogy, along with its predecessors to give readers the full, nutty story of Peter Leroy's solo cross-country 'aerocycle' flight 50 years ago. Alternating with Peter's memoir of the summer after his cross-country odyssey is the story of his return to hometown Babbington, N.Y., as a man in his 60s prepared to confess that his hand-built contraption never made it off the ground. As Peter and his wife, Albertine, continue the road trip begun in On the Wing, Peter reads aloud from his memoir, recalling the bizarre goings-on at the Summer Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry. His recollections show Peter to be an unreliable narrator whose wandering mind ends up being far more revealing than his impressions of reality might have been. The simple narrative structure belies the complex way that Kraft interweaves philosophy and science while gently pushing Peter and Albertine toward the big moment of truth. Kraft brings the trilogy to a fitting end, and the collected works comprise an intricate, intelligent and finely crafted saga."—Publishers Weekly