Product Description
Peter Leroy struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping his mother’s hopes and his mother’s boat afloat.
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.
“Inflating a Dog . . . is a novel about physical and spiritual buoyancy. It’s about keeping boats afloat and hopes aloft, and how, in one summer of Peter’s adolescence, he manages to do both. . . .
At 56, Peter is looking back at a period in his early teens when his mother, Ella, was losing faith in herself and life’s possibilities. In an attempt to become something more than a bland housewife, Ella had started various crackpot businesses, from candy making to ‘high-heel-low-heel convertible shoes.’ None succeeded. ‘Most of the time,’ Peter observes, ‘there was a deadness in my mother’s eyes, the blankness that comes with the expectation that nothing will make today different from yesterday or tomorrow different from today.’
[Today], we would label Ella ‘depressed,’ but in the wonderful invented idiom of the book she is ‘deflated.’ In the town of Babbington in the 1950’s, Peter reports, teenagers had devised a very precise vocabulary to describe the phenomenon of enthusiasm and all its nuances. They had started with the phrase ‘blown up’ — or, more elegantly, ‘inflated’ — to capture the feeling of being filled with amazement, delight, and inspiration. . . .
Over the course of the summer, Peter has two projects: to inflate his mother and to seduce Patti Fiorenza, a schoolmate of cartoonishly exaggerated sexual allure. The plot revolves around Ella’s purchase of a leaky clam boat (clams are a recurring Kraft motif, his madeleines) and her plan to offer catered cruises. Peter believes it is essential that Ella never discover the seriousness of the boat’s leak. ‘Hope,’ he explains, ‘is like a warm breeze that lifts and lofts and carries us on when we hardly have the will to carry on otherwise.’ Every night he sneaks away and pumps out the boat, so that his mother can proceed in ignorant bliss and, with luck, regain her zest for life.”
Jennifer Reese, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] bittersweet tale of adolescence recollected in tranquility. . . . Glorious stuff.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Raucous, wise, and great fun, this is simply not to be missed.”
Nancy Pearl, Booklist
“The reader feels flattered and privileged to be invited to join Kraft’s remarkable, ongoing dance of time and memory.”
Richard Gehr, Newsday
“A hilarious riff on Don Quixote, on the desire for fame, the need for success, the power of fantasy.”
Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
“Provocative, poignant and deeply satisfying . . . especially in lyrical passages that epitomize the secret dreams and yearnings of a soul in the making, a fool for beauty.”
Frederic Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal
“The best description of sex appeal anywhere, ever.”
Peter Jon Shuler
LENGTH: novel; about 89,000 words; 242 pages in the trade paperback edition
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.
“Inflating a Dog . . . is a novel about physical and spiritual buoyancy. It’s about keeping boats afloat and hopes aloft, and how, in one summer of Peter’s adolescence, he manages to do both. . . .
At 56, Peter is looking back at a period in his early teens when his mother, Ella, was losing faith in herself and life’s possibilities. In an attempt to become something more than a bland housewife, Ella had started various crackpot businesses, from candy making to ‘high-heel-low-heel convertible shoes.’ None succeeded. ‘Most of the time,’ Peter observes, ‘there was a deadness in my mother’s eyes, the blankness that comes with the expectation that nothing will make today different from yesterday or tomorrow different from today.’
[Today], we would label Ella ‘depressed,’ but in the wonderful invented idiom of the book she is ‘deflated.’ In the town of Babbington in the 1950’s, Peter reports, teenagers had devised a very precise vocabulary to describe the phenomenon of enthusiasm and all its nuances. They had started with the phrase ‘blown up’ — or, more elegantly, ‘inflated’ — to capture the feeling of being filled with amazement, delight, and inspiration. . . .
Over the course of the summer, Peter has two projects: to inflate his mother and to seduce Patti Fiorenza, a schoolmate of cartoonishly exaggerated sexual allure. The plot revolves around Ella’s purchase of a leaky clam boat (clams are a recurring Kraft motif, his madeleines) and her plan to offer catered cruises. Peter believes it is essential that Ella never discover the seriousness of the boat’s leak. ‘Hope,’ he explains, ‘is like a warm breeze that lifts and lofts and carries us on when we hardly have the will to carry on otherwise.’ Every night he sneaks away and pumps out the boat, so that his mother can proceed in ignorant bliss and, with luck, regain her zest for life.”
Jennifer Reese, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] bittersweet tale of adolescence recollected in tranquility. . . . Glorious stuff.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Raucous, wise, and great fun, this is simply not to be missed.”
Nancy Pearl, Booklist
“The reader feels flattered and privileged to be invited to join Kraft’s remarkable, ongoing dance of time and memory.”
Richard Gehr, Newsday
“A hilarious riff on Don Quixote, on the desire for fame, the need for success, the power of fantasy.”
Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
“Provocative, poignant and deeply satisfying . . . especially in lyrical passages that epitomize the secret dreams and yearnings of a soul in the making, a fool for beauty.”
Frederic Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal
“The best description of sex appeal anywhere, ever.”
Peter Jon Shuler
LENGTH: novel; about 89,000 words; 242 pages in the trade paperback edition
