At Home with the Glynns
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Peter Leroy receives his sexual initiation at the hands of the Glynn twins, becomes a sketch doctor, listens to many tales about the night the Nevsky mansion burned, learns the value of hope, and discovers the love of his life.
“Peter Leroy’s preadolescent voice, recaptured years later by his fictive middle-aged persona, is always unerringly itself, at once unexpectedly articulate and believably childlike. It is a likable voice, ingenuous, modest, wholly engaging. As such, it earns the most fanciful events in his story a certain credibility, or at least an unresisting suspension of disbelief. We are disposed to accept whatever Mr. Kraft, in the guise of Peter Leroy, tells us, even as he confesses to mixing invention with memory, even as events become more and more whimsically improbable. . . . A daring tour de force, At Home with the Glynns . . . never loses its poise. Mr. Kraft’s cunning novel is really a children’s book (like, say, The Catcher in the Rye) for adults, which I mean as unequivocal praise. There is nothing more serious, after all, than the playful, given full play.”
Jonathan Baumbach
The New York Times Book Review
“A witty and wildly digressive epistemological examination in the form of a childhood reminiscence.”
The New Yorker
“Devolves into a perfect madeleine . . . leaving an insatiable desire for more.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Anyone who has mourned, or yearned for, his or her younger self will find Kraft an enchantment.”
Publishers Weekly
“Kraft is a master of dialogue and description.”
Town and Country
“A splendidly vivid exploration of ‘sexual pleasure amplified and augmented by the thrill of adventure.’”
Dwight Garner, New York Newsday
“Nostalgic and very funny and just a little perverse.”
Frederic Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal
“Celebrates the savor of memory for the sophisticated palate.”
Boston Sunday Globe
“Postmodernism was never so pleasurable.”
Malcolm Jones, Jr., Newsweek
“One of the more hilariously erotic pieces of writing since Lolita.”
Edward Hannibal, The East Hampton Star
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peter Leroy, hotel owner in the town of Babbington, Long Island (``clam capital of America''), offers further marvelously appealing recollections of his boyhood misadventures of the mid-1950s. Readers unfamiliar with the earlier Leroy novels (What a Piece of Work I Am, etc.) will find Kraft's wry style, deep insights into youth and age and sly observation of adult behavior a rare delight. Peter's life at ages 11 and 12 revolves around his slightly bohemian neighbors--abstract painter Andy Glynn, his talkative wife Rosetta, a melancholy poet and compulsive entrant of product-promotion giveaway contests, and their forward, mischievous 13-year-old daughters, Margot and Martha. Peter's relationship with the Glynn sisters proceeds from dates spent watching arty European films to secret nighttime rendezvous in which he climbs the Glynns' stone wall and slips undressed into ``the twins'" bed for relatively uneventful trysts that inflame his prepubescent fantasies. Anyone who has mourned, or yearned for, his or her younger self will find Kraft an enchantment.
