Taking Off: A Novel [Hardcover]

Eric Kraft (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 11, 2006

One day, middle-aged Manhattanite Peter Leroy receives an unsettling postcard from a childhood classmate. With his wife, Albertine, he returns to his hometown of Babbington, Long Island, and finds it both transformed and strangely the same. 
 
For Babbington has been "redefined" as a theme park, in a scheme to draw tourists to the struggling community, complete with trained actors, cultural interpreters, and carefully designed simulations of small-town 1950s life. On the wall of Legends restaurant, Peter sees his own commemoration: a picture of the triumphant day when, as a  fifteen-year-old boy, he landed on Babbington's Main Street in the aerocycle he had built in his parents' garage, having flown  four thousand miles to New Mexico and back. 
 
Hailed in newspapers as the "Birdboy of Babbington," the youthful inventor reveled in his fame---but never disclosed the truth behind his flight. Now Peter wants to set the record straight---and with Albertine as his muse and conscience, he begins.
 
Taking Off is the first in a trilogy of novels about Peter Leroy's magical flight and its digressions along the way. Funny, warm, wise, and artful, this book---like all of its companion novels about Peter and his world---explores matters little and large with a light touch. Readers familiar with and new to these novels will delight in the wide-ranging invention and imagination of Peter's creator, Eric Kraft.
 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This addition to Kraft's well-received body of work (Passionate Spectator, etc.) serves as the premier installment of the Flying trilogy and features the ever-engaging Peter Leroy. Upon hearing rumors that his Long Island hometown is being turned into a theme park based on his childhood cross-country flight, Peter returns with his levelheaded wife, Albertine, and a "fearsome conscience" to set a few things straight. Peter fears the media will uncover the truth about his heroic, history-making, 4,000-mile round-trip solo flight to New Mexico when he was 15: that the "earthbound portions" of the flight made up most of the mission. Nostalgic, homespun backstory reveals Peter's childhood, his early fascination with flight and the frenetic events leading up to the construction of the "aerocycle" (based on plans printed in The Impractical Craftsman). The "Birdboy of Babbington" attempts to right his wrong with a heartfelt, revised expedition, but trouble looms, as Albertine may or may not have been kidnapped by a group of flyboy emergency medical technicians in this installment's closing pages. Kraft's unpretentious and engrossing storytelling make for a pleasant, escapist read. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In the latest gleefully satirical installment in Kraft's exuberantly inventive variation on Proust's reclamation of lost time, his whimsical and contemplative hero, Peter Leroy, with his beloved Albertine at his side, embarks on a new round of hilarious and charming misadventures and recollections. Kraft circles back to Peter's fifteenth year in Babbington, Long Island, when flights of fancy lead to aviation. Determined to fly to New Mexico, Peter builds an aerocycle with the help of his friends and a schematic from a favorite magazine, Impractical Craftsman. Actually, Peter never gets off the ground, but there's no rush. This is the taxiing start of an airborne trilogy, and Peter is a delightfully meandering narrator, interspersing memories and anecdotes with musings over the nature of nostalgia and the imagination, the cosmic aspects of a junkyard, and various matters mythological and lexicological. Book by book, Kraft is not only toying with Proust but also shadowing another French luminary, Balzac, and his monumental The Human Comedy. Sweetly philosophical and archly literary, this is one very smart, tender, and funny novel. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312318847
• ISBN-13: 978-0312318840
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,742,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eric Kraft grew up in Babylon, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he was for a time co-owner and co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He studied English at Harvard, where he invented the character Peter Leroy while dozing over a German lesson during his first year. The following year, he married his muse, Madeline Canning; they now have two sons.

After earning a Master's Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Kraft taught school in the Boston area for a while, moonlighting as a rock music critic for the Boston Phoenix. After a series of positions in editing and publishing, Kraft and his wife founded Kraft & Kraft, an editorial-services company for educational publishers. Throughout the years, he wrote daily, trying to discover the stories that Peter Leroy had to tell.

Eric Kraft is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was, briefly, chairman of PEN New England. He is also a recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

Learn more at www.erickraft.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The imprecision of memory, August 21, 2006

By 

Laurel M. Horton "laurelsc" (Seneca, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Taking Off: A Novel (Hardcover)

For those of us who love the various episodes of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences, & Observations of Peter Leroy, Taking Off is a classic. Peter's return to Babbington as an adult is skilfully woven with his memories of his childhood experience as the Birdboy of Babbington. Once again, we have the opportunity to look at the places where memory collides with reality, both in Peter's life and in our own. Reading this book, I wanted to search out back issues of "Impractical Craftsman," so I could marvel over such projects as Peter's floatplane.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kraft is a comic genius., August 8, 2006

By 

Doug Baldwin (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Taking Off: A Novel (Hardcover)

No one writes novels like Eric Kraft - lighthearted, literate, easy-to-read, yet packed with meaningful observations about growing up and growing old. "Taking Off" continues where his first book, "Little Follies" began, as Peter Leroy reminisces about growing up 50 or so years ago in the town of Babbington, Long Island. The thing is that the grown-up Peter feels free to invent or embellish as he sees fit, letting us in on the joke as he does so. Sometimes the truth isn't all that interesting, Leroy/Kraft seems to be saying, so why stay shackled to it?

This latest one is the first novel of a projected trilogy, with Peter trying to set the record straight about his teenage exploits as the Birdboy of Babbington. Evidently Peter did not actually fly that homemade plane all the way from New York to Mexico, as local legend has it. Evidently a lot of walking and taxiing was involved.

I laughed a lot while reading this, feeling let down at the end only because we Kraft fans will have to wait (a year? two years?) to enjoy Peter's exploits after taking off from Babbington.

BTW, "Taking Off" is not a "thriller," as another reviewer characterizes it: it's pure comedy.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget Keillor and read Kraft, October 3, 2006

By 

T. Berner (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Taking Off: A Novel (Hardcover)

Eric Kraft and Garrison Keillor are both prominent satirists of the particular part of the United States where they grew up, Kraft covering the south shore of Long Island and Keillor covering Minnesota. As it happens, I grew up in both locations (well, in the case of Keillor, Wisconsin, but close enough). Why do I find Keillor unreadable and overrated and Kraft a hidden gem? There are several reasons:

1. Keillor's humor is repetitious. "Guy Noir, Private Eye" is cute and amusing the first time you hear it, but dull and humorless after the third or fourth time, not to mention the thirtieth or fortieth time. With Kraft, you never know what the next page will bring. He is the master of digressions, dragging in all sorts of asides, making his books a constant and rewarding surprise.

2. Keillor displays a contempt for the people he writes about. His tone encourages his readers to feel superior to the people of the rural Midwest. Kraft makes his people look silly at times, but the first person narrator always gets his share of the pratfalls, resulting in a more democratic and humane form of humor.

3. Keillor relies on the ironic. He really has nothing more to say than to beat a bunch of stale jokes to death and count on his readers to share in his attitude. Kraft can be enjoyed on many levels: the warm nostalgia of a memoir of the fifties, the satire inherent in spotting the limitations of such a memoir, the compromises writers make when they write history (particularly personal history), the limitations of memory . . . you can probe as deeply as you like or just enjoy the surface. As all great literature does, Kraft enters into a dialog with the reader, providing him or her with what he or she wants to take from the story.

The result is that Keillor's northern Midwest bears no recognizable connection to reality while Kraft wakens memories I have forgotten for forty years.

Oh, and Kraft is ten times funnier, too.