Synopses & Reviews
Critics have compared him to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire--an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe--Flying.
It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.
Drawing together Eric Kraft's previously published Taking Off and On the Wing with the brand-new final part of the story, Flying Home, Flying is a buoyant comedy of remarkable wingspan, a hilarious story of hoaxes, digressions, do-it-yourself engineering, and the wilds of memory--and a great satire of magical thinking in America.
Eric Kraft has taught school, written textbooks, and was the co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He lives in New Rochelle, New York, with his wife, Madeline.
Critics have compared him to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astairean artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universeFlying.
It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New Mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.
Drawing together Eric Kraft's previously published Taking Off and On the Wing with the brand-new final part of the story, Flying Home, Flying is a buoyant comedy of remarkable wingspan, a hilarious story of hoaxes, digressions, do-it-yourself engineering, and the wilds of memoryand a great satire of magical thinking in America. "Kraft's unpretentious parodies of contemporary society and its affectations are the best thing about Flying, shrewd enough to delight any aficionados of postmodern fiction who can get past the novel's Leave It to Beaver facade . . . Beneath its aw-shucks surface, Flying is an ingenious, at times dizzyingly self-inverting assault not only on the truth, but on the concoction of palatable fictions, as well. Its only inviolate god is the human imagination; it's a paean to flight by a boy who never left the ground, except, perhaps, where it counts most: in his mind."Laura Miller, The New York Times
"Eric Kraft is an oddball, an eccentric, a bit of a geniusthe 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 descriptionsauthor and character, ventriloquist and dummy, left brain and right brainare 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 adolescencethe 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 almostthe 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 peoplewhich we then werecould labor under such an absurd delusion. If you feel that way, I just want to inform youor remind youthat 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 themethe 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 Leroyaka 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 celebrityand 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
Review
Praise for Eric Kraft's Taking Off"Hilarious and charming...sweetly philosophical and archly literary, this is one very smart, tender, and funny novel."--Booklist
"At its deepest level, the book is a study of disconnects--the gaps between aspiration and achievement, between image and reality, and, most of all, between the seeming sanctuary of the past and the unsettling nature of the present."--Seattle Times
Review
"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 magazine
"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. . . . Kraft plays the clown, but something essential and transformative is also at stake. . . . Flying abounds in . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . Flying, though episodic, has a pleasing coherence and sweep, and feels like Kraft's grandest achievement since Herb 'n' Lorna."--Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times
"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
"Hilarious. . . . Kraft's protagonist through twelve 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.”--Library Journal
"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. . . . The finished trilogy is a trip not to be missed.”
Kirkus Reviews
"With Flying, Eric lighter-than-air Kraft barnstorms several miles above where most writers' imaginations dare to ascend."--Ed Park, author of Personal Days
"A hilarious and masterfully told tale."--St. Petersburg Times
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Review
"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 magazine
"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. . . . Kraft plays the clown, but something essential and transformative is also at stake. . . . Flying abounds in . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . Flying, though episodic, has a pleasing coherence and sweep, and feels like Kraft's grandest achievement since Herb 'n' Lorna."--Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times
"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
"Hilarious. . . . Kraft's protagonist through twelve 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.”--Library Journal
"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. . . . The finished trilogy is a trip not to be missed.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"With Flying, Eric lighter-than-air Kraft barnstorms several miles above where most writers' imaginations dare to ascend."--Ed Park, author of Personal Days
"A hilarious and masterfully told tale."--St. Petersburg Times
Synopsis
Critics have compared him to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire--an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe--Flying.
It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.
Drawing together Eric Kraft's previously published Taking Off and On the Wing with the brand-new final part of the story, Flying Home, Flying is a buoyant comedy of remarkable wingspan, a hilarious story of hoaxes, digressions, do-it-yourself engineering, and the wilds of memory--and a great satire of magical thinking in America.
About the Author
Eric Kraft has taught school, written textbooks, and was the co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He lives in New Rochelle, New York, with his wife, Madeline.
Reading Group Guide
1. Despite Peter's ambivalent feelings about being the so-called Birdboy of Babbington, he was nevertheless flattered that his hometown was going to be organized around a re-enactment of the day of his triumphant return. Why was Peter flattered even though he was disappointed to see Babbington made into a staged tourist destination? How could he be at once proud of the attention he was getting and ashamed of the historical inaccuracies that made him famous?
2. Peter wants to tell people about his memories and his life. He even talks about the desire to force his stories on other people and the fact that this reliving-through-telling is a central desire for him. Why does Peter want to tell stories about himself, sometimes to a captive audience? Is he trying to recapture the past? To change it? To change himself?
3. Peter expects his father to be the biggest obstacle to his trip to New Mexico. Yet, when he broaches the subject at the dinner table, he suddenly sees in his father a glimmer of recognition. Why, in that moment, do they now seem to understand each other?
4. Peter often winks at the reader to let him or her know when he has embellished or altered the story. What do you think his reasons are for fictionalizing some of his experiences and, interestingly, then letting the reader in on it?
5. Kraft tells the story of Flying as two narratives, one that follows the events of Peters cross-country journey on the aerocycle, and another in which Albertine and Peter discuss his youthful adventure. Discuss how the second layer of the story, that of Peter and Albertine, invites a deeper reflection on the events of the earlier journey.
6. Flying is often satirical, but what is the intended target of its satire? Is the book also a kind of social commentary, and, if so, what is Kraft telling us about our society?
7. When Peter visits the marshmallow festival, he is insulted when the people from this small town insist that their festival is superior to the clam festival back in Babbington. Nevertheless, Peter tries to enjoy the marshmallow festival as much as he would have enjoyed the clam festival back home. Why does he try to enjoy it? Why does the experience make him homesick?
8. On numerous occasions, Peter talks about seeing a dark-haired girl who catches his attention. She seems to be a different girl each time, but later Peter reveals that on each occasion, this girl was “really” Albertine. He calls the other girls retrospective manifestations of her. Was it an act of will on Peter's part to see Albertine's face each time? Do you think he remembers her as she is now, as an adult, or do you that think he sees a younger version of Albertine, at the age he was at the time? Have you ever recalled events in such a manner, replacing the faces in your memories with people from your present?
9. When Peter and Albertine meet the jester who works at the Knight's Lodging motel, Peter learns that his boyhood flight influenced this man's life for the worse, that the jester became obsessed with a dream of flying that turned out to be foolish. Why was the jester unsuccessful in his attempts? Why was persistence in folly bad for him but good for Peter?
10. When Peter first arrives in New Mexico, he gets a chance to talk to a crowd of people who have assembled to greet aliens that they believe are coming to visit our planet. Thinking that Peter is an alien, the crowd prompts him to take the stage and give them pearls of wisdom. Why was the audience so captivated by Peter? In what ways did his eccentricities fulfill the crowds expectations? What makes his advice seem so sage to the crowd? In what ways did what he told them match what they wanted to hear?
11. Peter talks about life as being ultimately patternless, yet people nevertheless want pattern. Their desire for pattern and predictability seems to be reflected in the pre-packaged entertainment we see in many of the places Peter visits. Is this desire for pattern, for having a pre-set structure and plan for life, unavoidable? Does Peter's rendition of his life into memoirs represent a patterning of his life? Is that why he's so eager to tell people stories?
12. What makes Peter and Albertine such a good match? What do you think Peter would be like without Albertine?