Do Clams Bite?

Peter Leroy

Leroy considers the origins of his childhood pelecypodophobia (the fear of bivalve mollusks), meets the imaginary friend who will remain his best friend for life, memorizes the legends of his ancestors in the Leroy line (including Black Jacques Leroy, who “invented beer”), studies his father's nude photographs of family friend May Castle, and enjoys a moonlight swim with Margot and Martha, the Glynn twins, after which he concludes that clams do not bite.

"Do Clams Bite? chronicles Peter's sufferings when he goes clamming with his grandfather, expecting momentarily to have a vital hunk of his anatomy bitten off (a fear known as pelecypodiophobia). These otherwise cherished visits to his grandparents are enriched by glimpses of Great-Grandmother Leroy, who lives at the top of the house in a room filled with coconuts carved to represent members of the family, including the legendary brewer Black Jacques Leroy. . . . In presenting his characters in all their banality, looniness, and bungling, Kraft does it with a kind of tender respect for the basic dignity of even the most pathetic and obnoxious."
    Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine

“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.”
     Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker