In 1962, as a college sophomore, Eric Kraft fell asleep in the library. Among books surrounding him, he began to dream . . . of a nameless boy, sitting on a dilapidated dock in the warm sun of a summer day, playing a game: He was trying to bring the soles of his bare feet as close as he could to the surface of the water, without touching it.

That boy became Peter Leroy, and from Kraft’s dream grew one of the most delightful, unusual projects in contemporary literature. Funny, touching, witty, mythic, and profound, Kraft’s novels featuring Peter, his friends and family, and the seaside town of Babbington create an alternative reality—a world in which we see ourselves, darkened and wavering, as if reflected by deep water.

Little Follies gathers nine Peter Leroy novellas into one volume: the perfect introduction to an irresistible cycle of books by an author sometimes compared to Cheever, Proust, Twain, Borges, Russell Baker, and Garrison Keillor, but who is uniquely Eric Kraft.

“I envy the lucky souls who are meeting Peter Leroy for the first time.”
   Armistead Maupin  [MORE]

“Tiny and enormous, full of mystery and wonder.”
   Robert Plunket, The New York Times Book Review [MORE]

“A comic masterpiece.”
   Ariel Swartley, Boston Phoenix  [MORE]

“Wonderfully touching and mythic.”
   John Stark Bellamy II, Cleveland Plain Dealer [MORE]

“A bedtime story for adults.”
   Nancy Evans, Glamour  [MORE]

“It would be easy to become addicted.”
   Campbell Geeslin, People  [MORE]

“The sex is bracing and the boating can’t be beat.”
   Edna Stumpf, Philadelphia Inquirer  [MORE]

“Delightful.”
   James Kaufmann, Christian Science Monitor  [MORE]

“Strikingly new.”
   Walter Kendrick, The Village Voice  [MORE]

“Wit and humor pervade all the adventures.”
   Malcolm Jones, Jr., Saint Petersburg Times  [MORE]

“The writing is incredibly beautiful.”
   Lee Grove, Boston Magazine  [MORE]

“A major new humorist.”
   John Gabree, Newsday  [MORE]

“Wonderfully different from most literary efforts.”
   Mark Muro, The Boston Globe  [MORE]

“Kraft is clearly producing a work of stature.”
   Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine [MORE]

“A masterpiece of American humor.”
   David Chute, The Los Angeles Times  [MORE]

“Winningly antic.”
   Michael Upchurch, The Washington Post  [MORE]

“Eric Kraft is one of our best writers.”
   Roger Harris, The Newark Star-Ledger  [MORE]

“Complex and funny.”
   Jim Erickson, The Wichita Eagle  [MORE]

“A consistently funny book.”
   David Dodd, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle [MORE]

“Mystery, tragedy, jealousy, love, wisdom, irony, wonder.”
   James Idema, Chicago Tribune  [MORE]

“The essential work of one of our most distinctive comic talents.”
   R. D. Pohl, The Buffalo News  [MORE]

“One of the funniest novels I have ever read.”
   Michael Z. Jody, The East Hampton Star  [MORE]

“An ingenious investigation of the way we build our myths.”
   Julie Salamon, The Wall Street Journal  [MORE]

“Clever, anecdotal, suspenseful, and funny.”
   Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker  [MORE][COMPLETE REVIEW]

“A triumph.”
   Robert Crampton, The Times (London)  [MORE]

RECOMMENDED BY THE READER’S CATALOG

Little Follies is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin’s Press, at $13.00.

You should be able to find Little Follies at 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)

You can order it on the Web from Amazon.com Books.

Libros en Español: Little Follies is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino.

“Little Follies is a modern rarity: a sly and sweet-spirited meditation on childhood in which high art and sheer entertainment are gloriously one and the same. I envy the lucky souls who are meeting Peter Leroy for the first time.”
   Armistead Maupin

The Little Big Book

UP to now, most readers who have encountered the writings of Eric Kraft have done so through two novels—“Herb ’n’ Lorna” and “Reservations Recommended,” which came out in 1988 and 1990. But over the last decade Kraft has generated a cult following through a series of eight slender paperback novellas—set in fictional Babbington, Long Island, on Bolotomy Bay—which irradiate with humor and clarity a world of tract houses, public schools, and the hearty bromides of the American nineteen-fifties. The novellas were issued, beginning in 1982, by Applewood Books, a small Boston-area publisher; the books were always hard to find and are now out of print. It was not their obscurity that made them cult objects—or not only their obscurity—but, rather, their intensely personal quality, which turned the unstated pact that is always present between reader and author into something that felt more exclusive, like a private joke. The eight novellas (along with a new one) have now been collected into a hefty volume called “Little Follies: The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (so far)” (Crown; $22), and previous initiates into Kraft’s world will have to forgo the coziness of belonging to a privileged é1ite. The secret is out.
    Mostly, what happens in the novellas is that time passes: “so far” stretches from infancy to the shaky verge of puberty. Their claim to fame is the creation, through a profusion of literary and visual devices, of a reality that is recognizable and believable but also frankly artificial and contrived. At times, reading Kraft is like stumbling across memories of your own life, and yet the work is self-consciously—pointedly—literary. Its allusions, some blatant and others invisibly woven in, range from Proust to Mark Twain. Its jokes range in style from buffoonish vaudeville to the kind of deadpan drollery you find in Raymond Queneau, while the prematurely ripe perceptions of the narrator’s younger self inevitably call to mind the pseudo-biography of the literary prodigy in Steven Millhauser’s “Edwin Mullhouse.”
    In the earliest installment, Peter Leroy performs impossible feats of memory, at one point placing himself in his high chair trying “disdainfully” to push to one side of the tray a piece of toast that was retrieved from the floor with “cat hairs and a little fluff ball . . . stuck to it.” In later episodes, he is often consciously aping the adults around him, but not altogether in the way a child normally would: at the age of eight, Peter refers to a beer manufactured by an ancestor as being “not like the insipid pisswater they try to pass off on people nowadays,” and a year later he describes a classmate to whom he feels no attraction whatsoever (a point central to the story, since she is hotly pursuing him) as “quite a little number.” That these stories are about a child, beginning with his departure from the hospital where he was born and ending with his birth as a writer, around the age of eleven, does not in the least preclude their being, thanks to a witty prematurity, preoccupied with sex. Peter progresses from his sexy neighbors in “My Mother Takes a Tumble” (the opening story) to twins who demonstrate that girls are not castrated boys in “Do Clams Bite?” (the second one) and eventually to a boys’ adventure serial featuring a certain improbable maid: Peter imagines her imprisoned in a bathtub full of Jell-O from which her rescuer can release her only by eating his way toward her naked flesh with a spoon—“Not a big spoon. A little spoon, a demitasse spoon.”
    What the stories gracefully decline to be preoccupied with is their narrator. The people looming largest on Peter’s early emotional horizon—and hence in the book—are his two grandfathers, a bachelor neighbor, and a rough-and-ready older boy, each of whom can be seen as initiating this thoughtful child into a version of manhood to which he would otherwise be unlikely to aspire, or at which he must fail. He is inadequate at clamming with his father’s father, useless in building a shortwave radio with his mother’s father or a boat with his pal, and can win arguments with the neighbor, Dudley Beaker, only in revisionist fantasy.
    The propensity of memory, and fiction, for revision is something the adult Peter makes much of in prefaces to the novellas, where he purports to account for oddities of narration. But what follows invariably contradicts the prefaces, and a network of additional tiny contradictions leaps out as one proceeds. The preface to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” says, logically enough, that the following story concerns the significance of a day when Mrs. Leroy fell from her lawn chair. It turns out, though, that the real significance of that day is the introduction of the Leroy family to Dudley Beaker’s new sweetheart, Eliza Foote—who turns out to be the central character—and the whole story takes a tumble if you remember that Peter has asserted in the preface that Eliza Foote is the major element of fiction in the story. More outrageously contradictory is the preface to “The Fox and the Clam,” which discusses a fable and a boy called Matthew. In the story, the narrator meets Matthew in nursery school and encounters the fable in an anthology titled “The Little Folks’ Big Book.” But the preface has told us that the fable was not really in the “Big Book” and that “I didn’t meet Matthew until I entered high school.”
    Even the information within the frame of the preface is likely to wobble off the canvas. In “Tumble,” as in all the stories, Peter’s grandfather is a Studebaker salesman. (In “Herb ’n’ Lorna,” which also involves some of the “Little Follies” characters, his job figures in the plot and is “documented,” as in a biography, with glossy pages of photographs midway through the book.) But in the preface to “Tumble” Peter assures us that he invented his grandfather’s career, because he needed to explain why everyone on their street owned a Studebaker: “I knew that if I included this remarkable fact without explanation the reader would regard it as gratuitously absurd.” He then goes into an elaborate backpedalling refinement of his description of the houses in the neighborhood, in which is buried the news that on the other side of the street there were no Studebakers, “despite the efforts of my grandfather”—efforts that we’ve just been told didn’t exist.
    The sincere and cautious tone of these prefaces is that of someone struggling for truth. They’re like the italicized interpolations in Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood” (“The most likely thing, I fear, is that I fused two memories. Mea Culpa”). But this narrator is either remarkably careless or lying through his teeth. In either case, the scrupulosity of the prefaces makes you believe in a real historical past belonging to a person named Peter Leroy—that is, makes you believe in the stories. That the adult Peter Leroy confesses to having made things up only enhances his credibility; if you don’t exactly believe him you nevertheless find yourself believing in him. His comradely confessions of authorial high jinks invite you to feel superior, as the worldly reader who knows all about things like “willing suspension of disbelief,” and at the same time you do, quite simply, believe. In effect, you are always reading at least two stories: the manifest one, which is clever, anecdotal, suspenseful, and funny, and a mystery, full of clues about the construction of the very book you are reading.
    The stories are not without their own double messages. The Eliza Foote supposedly invented by the invented author of “My Mother Takes a Tumble” materializes in response to an ad placed by a “lovely young woman in unfortunate circumstances” looking for a Lonely Man. The person behind the ad, however, is not a woman, lovely or otherwise, but the suave and pompous Dudley Beaker, who hopes to cash in by creating a form of epistolary soft porn. What emerges is an epistolary romance—or romantic travesty. Eliza answers the ad as “John Simpson”; Dudley writes back as “Mary Strong.” Comic cross-purposes proliferate, and the correspondence is soon a mishmash of furious crossings out and veiled reproaches. The comic potential of cross-dressing has been amply demonstrated by the likes of Mozart and Shakespeare, and is as old as theatre itself. But this is mental crossdressing, and what you have to do while reading it—to keep in mind that the man, writing as a woman, thinks he is writing to another man, and that the woman, while imagining herself into the voice of a man, is writing to another woman, who really isn’t one—may make you feel that your mind is working as a gender-tracking literary abacus.
    Baroque as the narration is, poking in several directions at once, it is always moving forward, in a way that both reflects and exemplifies the passage of time. The stories are Proustian in intent, if not in style. It doesn’t take twelve years to read the nine Peter Leroy novellas—it probably doesn’t take twelve hours—but the stories are a deceptively modest attempt to render the very substance of experience in its smallest, stop-action increments. The allusions to “Remembrance of Things Past”—Peter’s eventual wife is named Albertine, and he refers to Balbec as one of the places that he “could, someday, actually visit”—are jokes with serious purpose (which is more or less the m.o. of the whole enterprise).
    Both the modesty and the seriousness of purpose are encapsulated in a three-page essay, in a story called “The Static of the Spheres,” on the nature of time and the making of toast. Peter extolls an appliance of his grandmother’s that conveys bread slices in a “rhythmic rightward shuffle” progressing toward toast:

    From a very early age, I loved watching—and listening to—the operation of this toaster. As the toaster operated, it produced a repetitive sound from somewhere inside the machine, from the scraping of some parts against others, a sound that I interpreted as words, the words Annie ate her radiator, repeated over and over while the bread toasted. I would sit and watch and listen to the toaster and watch the bread through the little window and try to decide where in its passage from left to right it became toast. And from that toaster I learned to think of time as a belt, to think of being as being in transit, and I laid the groundwork for a persistent nostalgic affection for the wave theory of electromagnetic radiation and round-faced watches and slide rules, and I developed a sense of time’s passing.

    All the characters in books live in the same place, the Big-Book place, and I’ve painted in so much of it over the years that I have a picture of a well-populated town, where, with Albertine on my arm, I sometimes walk along a shady street on a summer morning and pause to watch the talking squirrels gather nuts in Emma Bovary’s front yard while Tom Sawyer paints her fence.

Anna Shapiro
The New Yorker, July 6, 1992

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Little Follies 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.

“My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry” were originally published in paperback by Apple-Wood Books.

Little Follies was first published in hardcover by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail the author’s imaginary 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.