Customer Reviews

Leaving Small's Hotel

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Eric Karft has created a world that a reader can experience in various layers. Ach! Why try to compete with Mr. Kraft? His analogy of his books is that of a robust, zesty clam chowder. Do endulge yourself. You will be reading along, following the adventures of Peter Leroy, thinking this is perhaps a mild diversion of a book when a startling insight floats up on the page, or a trenchant observation astounds and delights you. I read this book a year ago (I got it as soon as it came out in May, 98 as I am A BIG Eric Kraft fan) and still think of it at least weekly. I anxiously await the next offering from Mr. Kraft, who brightens my world and spirit immeasurably through his work.

Peter Leroy writes his life story in an attic study as his wife Albertine renovates a quiet hotel on an island in Bolotomy Bay. When Small's Hotel starts to fail, Peter questions the value of literature in our time as well. Hotel guests want to ride jet skies, and editors want more sex and violence in the adventure books Peter writes for boys. Thus, "leaving Small's Hotel" is Eric Kraft's profound exploration of the viability of the imagination in a world that's lost all sense of proportion. That's our world, of course, and we need to learn from this intelligent, compassionate, funny book.

Peter Leroy does it again in this tale of the last days of Small's Hotel. As Peter tries to save the failing inn, he creates a theme event to draw more guests to the hotel. This event, a series of nightly readings, is the far greater feast for Kraft fans. Each story is another chapter in the "personal history, adventures, experiences, & observations of Peter Leroy (so far)." And each perfectly captures the suspension of disbelief of childhood, the mixture of fantasy and reality (in the moment and the memory). For readers, especially between 40 and 65, perfect moments of insight and beauty are to be found within these small tales. The new adventures, along with all of Kraft's works, are to be savored on sunny late afternoons when time permits idle nostalgia of our post-war youth.

The diminished role of Peter Leroy the child in the novel may have become necessary as he reaches age thirteen and his departure from Babbington and the 50's nears. This lesser role is perhaps a welcome relief for those who have read all of his novels, but the peter leroy left seems redundant. The leaving of Small's Island, if I may indulge in prediction, hints at the exhaustion of the character of peter leroy, at least as far as his being is so intricately tied to his surroundings, and perhaps Kraft's desire to move on. Will he forego the character in the sequal to this amazing book? In its tone and mood I sense an affinity with Delillo's Mao II. kent strock

Follow me on this: Eric Kraft is a real person. He has created a fictional character called Peter Leroy. Peter Leroy narrates the Peter Leroy novels. But, as far as Peter is considered, these are works of fiction -- sort of. He is telling his life story, but he's embellishing here and there, and reworking certain elements. And he tells us what's real and what isn't. Through this conceit (though by no means solely because of it), Kraft creates what one reviewer called "serious fiction that's fun to read." If Garrison Keilor was a true genius, he'd be Eric Kraft. LEAVING SMALL'S HOTEL is the latest in Peter's saga, and -- like all the others -- it's nostalgic and wise and funny and deep. Nobody else does what Kraft does. Read him.

Kraft tells a number of pointless stories in this novel concerning a pleasant enough couple failing at running a hotel on their own island. In each chapter, the husband-owner-writer reads to his guests a short story about himself as a fictional child who makes and sells UFO detection devices and digs caves with his friends among other pastimes. In some chapters, we hear a portion of a late night radio broadcast about some normal human obsenity (one that we could find ourselves in the daily paper or local news - but why would we want to hear more about human depravity?) from a cynical ventriloquist's dummy who encourages us to hide in our caves to avoid the dark side of life. This is meant to be deep stuff and illustrates how, I suppose, the hotel serves as a refuge (or cave) from real life for its owners/guests. There are some excerpts from a hired killer story that the narrator thinks he may write with the apparent goal of making some money to save the hotel. This is after we learn that the narrator has refused to continue writing a series of apparently successful children's books when the publishers demand more violence, etc. None of the stories tells us anything we do not already know. The characters in his stories are undeveloped, start nowhere, and end up nowhere. They do not grow or diminish ... they just are. Our hero is bland as a fictional child within the recurrent sub-story and as a dreamer adult in the main story. What was the point of this book, I wonder. That we all long for a refuge from the crud that we can find in life? What truth did I miss? It wasn't that the mish-mash of stories was confusing, it was that each story was a zero and all the stories added up to zero. Don't waste your time. Some people are easily entertained, I guess.

Dip into this book anywhere. Skip ten pages or 110. Read the whole thing or just read the first installment over and over and over again. It won't make the slightest bit of difference. For all it's supposedly clever feints, I found this book a grinding test of patience. Once you read the frist chapter, you've about got it. Characters, plot, and style are all thin to the point of banal, and the whole somehow manages to be even less than the sum of these thin ingredients. Among the other chores the reader must accomplish to reach the finish is to join in the narrator's conceit that his excessivly adolescent notes for a book would somehow interest a publisher, much less a reader.