A soaring American life remembered and
misremembered
Less than 10 pages into Flying, having
already laughed aloud several times, I was struck by a question too
seldom asked when trying out a new author: “How is it that I’ve
never heard of this guy?” Though Eric Kraft is prolific, talented,
literary-minded and genuinely hilarious, I’d never read any of his
work before his most recent release. And he’s been publishing these
strange and terrific novels since the late 1980s.
My unfamiliarity with Kraft is actually
no surprise, though. Such is a common enough fate for authors writing
funny books, which are easy to miss and seldom taken seriously by
reviewers. Fellow comic author Julian Gough bemoaned this problem and
the state of modern, unfunny literature in his essay “Divine
Comedy,” wondering “What is wrong with the modern literary novel?
Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so
bloody boring?” Readers of contemporary fiction might understand
what he means. I certainly do, which is why I felt such gratitude at
having happened upon Kraft, who is anything but boring, and has been
a favorite to an in-the-know cult for years.
Flying itself is an uncommon publishing
experiment. In it, two of Kraft’s previously released novels are
reprinted along with a new book, the final installment of the
trilogy. Like all of the writer’s 12 books,
these three are centered on protagonist Peter Leroy, a man whose life
is characterized by distracted, nostalgic flights of fancy and
reveries about any number of ideas, practical, philosophical and
nonsensical. His woolgathering is so chronic and overwhelming that he
can only drive a car when his wife is along for the ride, shouting
him back to reality when he begins to drift. Though Leroy and his
endless memoirs have been the subject of several previous novels (and
though there are inside jokes and references for readers better
versed in the larger work), Flying feels completely independent and
serves as an excellent introduction to what Kraft calls, rather
grandly, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences &
Observations of Peter Leroy.
In Flying, Peter Leroy recalls, from
the vantage of old age, the story of the summer between his junior
and senior years of high school, 50 years earlier. That summer, with
the help of classmates and members of his small Long Island
community, he built a flying machine, an “aerocycle,” which he
then piloted—or so he allowed everyone to believe—from his home
on Long Island to a summer academy for exceptional students in New
Mexico. In present day, Peter and his wife, Albertine, decide to
retrace his original route, exploring both a country and a man much
changed since his initial ride.
In Flying, almost all the new people
the narrator meets exhibit behavior bizarre enough to make them
candidates for the psych ward or wisdom so uncanny they’d qualify
as sages. These outrageous interactions make for fun reading, but as
they add up, the ring of truth and its accompanying strength is at
times sapped from the text—a common enough hazard for the funny
writer.
On other occasions, the laffs veer into
the realm of tedium, and it’s clear that certain scenes were more
amusing to write than they are to read. A cutesy re-enactment of the
famous cropduster-in-a-cornfield scene from North by Northwest is
written as if witnessed by our narrator from the porch of a nearby
house, but once the gag is understood, reading the detailed
description is a slog. In another instance, young Peter and a friend
gain access to a junkyard by slipping the guard dog a mickey buried
in a ball of ground chuck. It is a scene so ordinary and common that
even if it is intended as homage to some earlier work, it’s
agonizing to see it again.
Still, one is left feeling that Kraft
has achieved exactly what he intended in this book about finding the
truth in one’s past—the truth as it was lived and the truth as
one chooses to remember it. Strangely enough, the plot is the least
interesting thing about Flying. One isn’t driven to read on in
order to discover the outcome. Instead, like Peter Leroy himself, one
is driven onward because the trip is so much fun.