Year / 2009

by Edward Champion

Flying Roundtable: Stage Three

(This is the third of a five-part roundtable discussion of Eric Kraft’s Flying. Part One, Part Two, Part Four, and Part Five can also be read.)

Kathleen Maher writes:

kraftrt3Regarding the comparison of Flying to Proust (whose “Swann’s Way,” I almost struggled through); Nabokov (whom I admit enjoying); and Pynchon (never got past 100 pages) — these are blurb-writers’ selling points. The blurbs also compare Kraft’s writing to Fred Astaire’s dancing. You may be disinterested in Astaire’s Hollywood dance routines, but accusing him of “lead” feet? Not right. Suggesting Astaire was difficult to follow or understand? Unlikely.

Kraft writes easy prose. True, he employs serial references to high and low culture. But love him or hate him, Kraft has rhythm.

And although, I suggested Matthew Cheney might want to hang it up for another day, I’ve thought of another approach. Harold Brodkey was a writer who annoyed me so much I used to rip into his stories with furious curiosity and even a kind of vengeance.

Most of you may not be old enough to remember him. Harold Brodkey died of AIDS in 1996 and was published in The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, where he wrote book reviews and letters to the editor in the same convoluted, highfalutin voice in which he wrote his stories.

His Wiley Silonowitz “stories” were long even for the old-style New Yorker. They appeared as quasi-memoirs or roman a clef concoctions about growing up with an adoptive family. The ones I remember best damned the mother and/or sister, despite hints that the father molested him. Then in The New Yorker of 1995, Brodkey wrote a nonfiction “confession” that he was dying of AIDS, which at that time was shockingly honest.

If there happen to be others here who remember Brodkey, you’ll know his writing taunted us with the memoir/fact/fiction issue. Except it wasn’t scandalous back then. Nobody expected literature to sit in the witness box and tell the whole truth and nothing but. Readers expected literary work to show us what mattered rather than what indisputably happened.

Nigel Beale writes:

I, with Matthew, am having trouble taking off with this book. Have been slowly taxiing along now for some 70 pages, hoping to leave the ground.

Here is my early take:

It’s a pleasant enough meander through mind and memory –- reminiscent of DF Wallace in a way, though not so self obsessed, so claustrophobic, so micro-managed.

Funny, perhaps because of the initial Sterne quote, the first few pages reminded me of The Sot-Weed Factor. Playful. Not as engaging or funny, but certainly lighthearted enough to entertain. And faux grandiose in this way: “I have tried, during some of those telephone interviews, to correct a few errors of fact and interpretation, but my efforts have been dismissed with the condescending politeness that we employ with those whom we regard as having had their wits enfeebled by time.”

In addition to its theme, there’s also an amusing mock heroism to the writing that recalls Don Quixote. I like the passage above too because it sums up, I think, Peter’s sense that ‘truth’ doesn’t really matter. That regardless of what he may say, his interlocutors will interpret his story in ways they want to; just as the media treats its facts.

This leads to an examination of how the present re-writes the past: consciously, purposefully. In the case of “Babbington – Gateway to the Past,” it recreates an image of itself “as it never was.” Embellishing the truth — lying, for cold. commercial purposes — and unconsciously – honestly recalling detail which may or may not be accurate, versus dishonestly. At one point, Peter talks about remembering in a way that is honest “overall,” but at the same time inaccurate, “vague about details.” Telling a version of the truth, but one that allows people to believe what they want to believe. “Far from the version I planned to tell them.”

Peter flew a total of 180-200 feet on the way out to New Mexico, but he’s not about to dispossess his fans of the “heroic” image that most seem to hold of him as a fearless, resourceful adventurer.

Apropos of this, “Proust famously pointed out that we cannot remember what has not occurred; he might just as well have pointed out that we cannot digress from a route that we had not intended to take.” If people want to see my escapade as heroic, who am I to disagree…they aren’t listening anyway…and in fact, I kind of like the positive attention.

Kraft then gives us various takes on truth, memory, and dreams to contemplate:

Dreams free us from purposefulness.

Memory serves as a refuge from a painful present. There’s also a curiosity to notice what wasn’t initially noticed.

Memory/imagination as a flying machine, assembled from scratch, or from pieces cut from lived life.

Kraft’s prose to this point lacks Proust’s limpid beauty; his consistent, soft, sensual phrasing; but there are hints: I’m impressed with this for example: “the leisurely ascension of the morning mist from the slack surface of the river.” Slack! Very nice.

Hopefully more to come, for this, in large part, is what keeps me reading a book, along with its humour, and the strength of its ideas, how well they provoke debate.

I’ll check in after another two hundred pages or so, hopefully in totally engaged mode… For now, I look forward to hearing from others.

Daniel Green writes:

I’m hesitant to even interject my response to the book at all since, if anything, I find it even less compelling than either Matt or Robert. My problem is similar to theirs, however: the writiing is, well, boring, the character’s voice so “nice” the effect, at least for me, is simply eye-glazing. (The long stretches of superflous dialogue don’t help, either.) I’m sorry to say I couldn’t get even half of the way into the first novel before knowing that finishing the whole thing would be a hopeless task.

This is my usual response, however, to “clever” novels whose cleverness doesn’t permeate to the level of stylistic liveliness. The supposedly “quriky” story (which in this case for me never rises above mere whimsy) is told in such a bland and earnest way I never find myself engaged by it. My criticism can thus be taken as perhaps just a consequence of my particular reading preferences. Those who don’t share them can listen instead to the other voices in this conversation.

Sarah Weinman writes:

Flying has proved my rule that the authors most likely to make an impression are the ones that polarize people. And clearly, this book has polarized, what with me, Ed, Brian and Kathleen in the “positive to the point of evangelism” corner and everyone else who has chimed in so far, well, not having that reaction.

It does, I think, come down to voice, so let me bring up Matt Cheney’s question about it: “My problem with Peter’s narration is harder to define, but I can say that the voice seems awfully, well, nice.  Like Leave It to Beaver or My Three Dads.  Perhaps this is because, given how fragmented my reading of the book has been, I haven’t been able to get enough sense yet of what’s at stake within it, where its edges lie, and so perhaps I’m missing some big irony or subtle clues to an unseen darkness.”

Kraft’s books, or at least the ones I’ve read, are written in a kind of deliberate throwback to the narration style that permeated a lot of American literature and storytelling in the 1950s. And since Flying (and most of the Peter Leroy books, for that matter) purport to be a memoir of 1950s boyhood, it then takes on the boyhood narration characteristics of those time. The best example of this, far and away, is Jean Shepherd. No one really talks about Shep all that much anymore and it’s a damn shame, but to wit, he hosted a radio show for years (the heyday was the ’50s, on NY-based station WOR) that was listened to by practically *every* boy of a certain age, usually under the covers when parents thought they were asleep. Shepherd recounted stories – purportedly true, but heavily embellished – of his alter ego’s adventures in Hohman (really Holman) Indiana, but he also did crazy stuff like convince his audience to storm bookstores and order a book that didn’t exist, propelling I, Libertine to the bestseller lists before it was written. And of course there is A Christmas Story, which is based on Shepherd’s tales and after being a minor cult favorite is now aired religiously, wall-to-wall, every Christmas on cable channels.

Why this digression? Because if you don’t like or don’t care for Jean Shepherd, Eric Kraft may not be your thing. But Shep was the thing for so many people of a certain age, many of whom never got to see the sights of NYC. Shep had the knack of capturing the Americana flavor even though he lived an urbane, proto-beatnik existence in Greenwich Village (before decamping to Florida) but beneath the whimsy of his humor was a pretty nasty streak. Kids shot their eyes out with bb guns or glued their tongues to freezing poles. It all looked like the gloss of niceties, but beneath that gloss was the beating heart of how kids could be cruel and other dark impulses.

It’s pretty hard to be earnest now, or at least ape the trappings of earnestness, because irony and showy styles are so common as to be mind-numbing. Or you end up with commercial earnestness like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — a good book, but if you poke beneath its Hamlet structure and love of dogs, there isn’t really all that much embedded underneath. But Flying? It certainly looks smooth and easy because Kraft’s using a seemingly accessible style in order to engage (or, obviously as it’s turned out, not engage) the reader, but his is the subtle satire of an earlier age that is so little practiced no wonder some fail to recognize it.

More soon, but I hope others who haven’t yet responded will weigh in. And I suspect there’s more common ground between the two camps than we think! Or maybe I’m just a damn optimist, but I can’t help it.

Jason Boog writes:

I wanted to say thanks to Ed for including me on this spirited round-table. It will be something to behold, all the pro-Leroy and anti-Leroy folks on the same virtual page. First of all, Sarah writes: “Kraft’s books, or at least the ones I’ve read, are written in a kind of deliberate throwback to the narration style that permeated a lot of American literature and storytelling in the 1950s.” As a fan of the old Hardy Boys mysteries, Mad magazine and radio dramas, I cheered when she reminded us of those primary influences.

I spotted a “throwback” as well. Kathleen Maher brings up Don Quixote, noting: “Cervantes was skewering the popular (and purportedly kitschy) adventure stories that were popular in the early 17th century.” He was playing with a form that I think has everything to do with Flying — the picaresque. I think Peter Leroy is a great-great-great grandson of the picaresque hero.  I’m not the fancy English major I once was, but Wikipedia lays it out pretty well: “The picaresque novel (Spanish: “picaresca”, from “pícaro”, for “rogue” or “rascal”) is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society.”

However lovable Peter Leroy may be, nobody can deny he’s a lying, scheming, cheating “roguish hero”—both as a boy and a man. While his memoirs take fantastical leaps of logic, the actual events seem to depict his misadventures in “realistic and often humorous detail.” As we can see by his struggles as a penniless flyboy bartering with garbage dump bums, busty hotel workers, and disenchanted French literature professors, Peter fits the “low social class who lives by his wits” part.  As for the “corrupt society,” he’s tooling across Atomic Age Cold War America, where smart young boys are recruited by Kraft’s chilling brochure on page 54, corrupting kids with space race militarism: “YOUTH OF AMERICA! UNCLE SAM NEEDS YOU! … We need a new generation of whiz kids who can build rockets, satellites, and fearsome weapons for us!”

But you know what I love about the picaresque more than anything? The subtitles. This prose form developed the fine art of demarcating episodic adventures with subheadings like: “In Which Our Dashing Hero Meets The Damsel Of His Dreams And Loses Her To An Untimely Accident.” I’ve loved the technique since I was a kid, and I played with them in my novel writing. When I read Spaceman Blues by fellow Kraft-work analyst Brian Francis Slattery, I loved how he broke up his hallucinatory book with literary headlines. I ended up interviewing him about how he wrote those episodic subtitles. He cited William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg as the most helpful examples of the form. With dazzling headline breaks like: “Paneling, a Thought Experiment” (p. 146) and “Dreams of a Professional Fool” (281), I hereby add Kraft to Slattery’s list of literary headliners.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Eric Kraft, Part One

Eric Kraft appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #268.

Eric Kraft is most recently the author of Flying. This is the first of a three part conversation with Kraft about all of his Peter Leroy books, an epic of more than a million words which Our Young Roving Correspondent was insane enough to read. These podcasts tie in with a roundtable discussion of Flying involving numerous people.

(To listen to Part Two of this conversation, go here. To listen to Part Three of this conversation, go here.)

segundo268

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for his alter ego.

Author: Eric Kraft

Subjects Discussed: The relationship between Kraft & Leroy, reexamining and reimagining biographical details through a fictional hero, MTV and the 1950s, acts of liberation and the shared mind, the Larry Peters books and the gaps between the chapters, references to other books, the love affair between Peter and Albertine, the stewardess and the dark-haired lady, alter egos, Matthew Barber and B.W. Beath, the many twins throughout the Leroy books, being taken back to an earlier conception of the work, Mark Dorset, characters who knock on the doors, Porky White, aerocycles that does not fly, being able to talk with machines, the burdens of memories and stories being tinkered with, aging and dreaming, memories that trigger events, whether misrepresented representations can be defended, maternal grandmothers and erotic jewelry, the importance of digressing, whether every dreamer needs a muse, Albertine as an enabler, exploring the possibility that Albertine doesn’t exist, strangers vs. maps, Phileas Fogg, the conflict between living life and getting it written down, finding the humor in losing people, “printing the legend” while taking a stance for truth, dogboarding accidents, life as “the first draft of memoirs,” and auditors vs. readers.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Peter sets up this journey early on. He includes a helpful explanation and a chart that indicates his need to digress. He writes, “To digress, you must begin by traveling a route that will get you where you intend to go. You must have a goal and a plan for achieving it in order to depart from it. You cannot digress from the right path unless you are already on it.” And yet Peter does acquire a number of maps obtained from gas stations. He then tapes this up on the wall. And then he decides to do away with these maps. And he writes, “Having no map forced me to ask directions of strangers, and along the way I learned that doing so leads to fascinating exchanges, exchanges that are, more often than not, useless, but fascinating nonetheless.” But then, he writes that if he has to take his journey all over again, well, he would do so without a map. Because he’s decided in hindsight that maps are more trustworthy than the advice of strangers. So it seems to me that there’s a conflict going on here. Almost a tragic conflict. Because on one hand, he wants to digress. He wants to meet these particular strangers. On the other hand, if he had to do it again, he would do it through this kind of topographical thrust. And he becomes just as trapped by living on that particular structure and avoiding the digression, if he goes that particular route. So what of this notion of revisiting a possibility in hindsight like this? When Peter buys the candy bars also, it’s Albertine who comes up to the clerk and expresses the magic of receipts. And it’s a wonderful little passage. But this leads me to wonder if Albertine is something of an enabler so that Peter can occupy this disparity between what he did in this past (allegedly) and what he’s coming to terms with in the present, which might also be further tinkering as well.

erickraftKraft: Yes.

Correspondent: And what he insists he would do now if he had that particular chance again. I mean, could Peter even function without her?

Kraft: (laughs) No!

Correspondent: I’m wondering though if it’s your suggestion that every dreamer along these lines needs a muse? I know that’s a lot to throw at you. But go for it.

Kraft: Yeah. An enabler certainly she is, and muse she certainly is. She also grounds him. In the best sense. In ensuring that if his head is in the clouds, then his feet are somewhere near the ground at least. And she, at the same time, encourages him. She establishes for him a space within which he will be free to let his imagination roam. He wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything much in this life without her. Clearly, when he was a boy before they met, he attempted many things. Nearly none of them ever worked out as he hoped they would. Or even worked out at all. And that’s a pattern that is extended into his mature — can we dare to call him mature? Into his later life anyway. But Albertine, she smiles lovingly at his quirks and follies and the strange things that she tries to do. But she’s also there to say, “Peter, it’s time to calm down, sit down, and look at this rationally.”

Correspondent: But simultaneously, one might also consider that Albertine may also be a figment of his imagination. Certainly that’s what I thought.

Kraft: How dare you! (laughs)

Correspondent: Well, I’m telling you. You’ve been holding back on this whole meetup between her and Peter!

Kraft: You’ve found something that hardly anyone has even dared to suggest. But I have asked myself several times whether that could be the case. I’ll just ask the question. I don’t have an answer for this yet. Is Albertine Peter’s way of keeping himself under control to a degree? I don’t know yet.

Correspondent: It’s certainly possible.

Kraft: I don’t know if I want to explore that much more, but it’s certainly possible.

Correspondent: But since he is in the process of concocting composite characters like Raskol, his childhood friend, since Matthew Barber is fictive sometimes and possibly real in some sense, and since you have constantly avoided the question of how he met Albertine, this is why…

Kraft: Although, that’s coming up!

Correspondent: I know that’s coming up. I know you’ve settled that.

Kraft: But even if you read it, you’ll still be asking yourself whether he might not have concocted this. And I’ll be asking myself too.

BSS #268: Eric Kraft, Part One (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Flying Roundtable: Stage Two

(This is the second of a five-part roundtable discussion of Eric Kraft’s Flying. Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five can also be read.)

Matt Cheney writes:

kraftrt2I’m going to throw another topic out there for discussion, because I’m only one third of the way through Flying and I’m struggling.

Here’s my question: What do you make of the narrative voice?  Or voices, if you identify them differently?

I ask because I’ve been reading the book off and on for a month now, but have only just begun On the Wing, not for lack of effort, but for the fact that all the way through Taking Off I found myself gritting my teeth — I utterly hated Peter Leroy, mostly because of the way the book’s sentences rang in my ears.  The writing seemed to me slick, even smarmy, and all I wanted to do was get it out of my head.  I kept trying to put my finger on what it was that bothered me so much, that made me grit my teeth as if I’d OD’ed on Smarties, but I didn’t get very far in my quest to figure out what was making me react in such a strange way.  The closest I came was when I decided I found the captions to the pictures annoying.  I liked the pictures, particularly the doctored pictures of old magazines and books, which were clever and surprising, but the captions weren’t usually necessary, and I resented being given redundant information.  I wanted them to do something more, to be in some sort of conflict with the pictures or the narrative, to add complexity rather than just tell us stuff we already knew.

But that’s primarily a problem for me only with the captions.  My problem with Peter’s narration is harder to define, but I can say that the voice seems awfully, well, nice.  Like Leave It to Beaver or My Three Dads.  Perhaps this is because, given how fragmented my reading of the book has been, I haven’t been able to get enough sense yet of what’s at stake within it, where its edges lie, and so perhaps I’m missing some big irony or subtle clues to an unseen darkness.  (Which says more, I expect, about me than the book — “pleasant” is not, for me, a term of praise for art.)  Perhaps On the Wing and Flying Home will add some vinegar.  I haven’t yet been able to make myself care about Peter’s various embroideries of the apparent “truth” within the novel’s story because I haven’t yet been able to figure out why it matters whether he’s “truthful” or not, or what effect this should have on me as a reader.

Or maybe it’s just that the book is comedic and I don’t get the comedy.  (Is it comedic?)  It hits me in a similar way that Confederacy of Dunces, another book I found far more annoying than amusing, did, and maybe there’s some sort of litmus test for this kind of thing — I know plenty of people who find Confederacy uproariously funny and great fun to read, but I’d rather spend a day watching water boil than read that book again.  Similarly, I adore Catch-22 and know plenty of people who would rather read Confederacy of Dunces whilst standing in boiling water than read Heller’s novel, so…

It’s late at night and I’m rambling; my apologies.  I merely wanted to ask you all for some reports of your reading experience of the book — I don’t know if it will help me get beyond my allergy to Peter Leroy, but I am honestly curious to know how people perceived the book’s narrative voice — charming? engaging? amusing? enthralling? — because I feel kind of stuck in how I first heard it, and there’s no way I’ll make it through the next two novels if I continue to hear it that way.

Kathleen Maher writes:

I’m speaking to Matthew Cheney first, because his message pops up first in my gmail.

If you’re beginning On The Wing, and Peter Leroy grated on you all through Taking Off, I doubt you’ll enjoy you the rest of it. If it irks you, I would put it down. (Ed may not agree with me on this, because if you push forward, hating it, you might contribute more to the roundtable than all those saying, “It’s so great, so hilarious!”) Generally, I make it a rule to give a book 100 pages–I’m a writer, not a book reviewer–and past that, if I don’t like it, I put it on the shelf. A year or two later, I might try it again. Frequently, it’s that second or third time that the book grabs me.

This has convinced me that fiction is even more subjective than real life, which strikes me as so subjective that (quoting Sarah and Ed and Brian) it compares to walking on quicksand.

In reference to Ed’s question about Peter possibly being tragic, notice that: No one dies; Albertine has proper health coverage; and Peter is far better off as a muddleheaded dreamer than Big Bob, once head of the Muddleheaded Dreamers Motorcyle Club now the “world’s foremost [clinician] for Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.”

Dr. Bob Wylie suggests a tragic if tangential Quixote-type more than the self-aware, self-conscious but all the happier for it Peter Leroy.  Although once you bring up “swagger,” Ed, I see various parallels between Peter Leroy taxiing the country in Spirit and Quixote charging on horseback. I read Don Quixote in college and at that time found it likewise hilarious, perhaps because the teacher presented it that way. Cervantes was skewering the popular (and purportedly kitschy) adventure stories that were popular in the early 17th century. I’m sure there must be dissertations galore comparing those cheap oral tales with DC or Marvel superheroes and/or the 1950s real-life versions of Kraft’s Bold Feats magazine. 

Easy to imagine that someone might not be in the mood for these hi-jinks, Matthew. And because Kraft does deftly address high and low culture, questions of taste, time, and philosophy in such a seamless, fast-paced style, his prose might come across as “slick.” But that’s the risk anyone takes telling stories.

I promised my husband to keep this short. Ha-ha. The poor man suffered along as I insisted upon trying to read passages out loud to him, but mostly giggled..

Among my favorite passages is the one where Judge Whitley takes Peter outside and questions him about Faustroll.

“You have sailed in the doctor’s boat, across the Squitty Sea?…soujourned in the Land of Lace?…

“You don’t want to go waving this book around. People are going to take it the wrong way….”

Then, too, as someone who too late in life attemped rollerblading too fast and too often, giving it up only after a few full-fledged concussions and a shattered wrist, I especially relished the dog-boarding business.

Robert Birnbaum writes:

Well, fellow bibliolistas,

Since I began to read Flying by Eric Kraft late last month — an author previously unread by me — I have begun ten or twelve books, 6 or 7 of which I read to their ends.  So, it seems clear this narrative hasn’t exactly captivated me. Like Matthew, I find a few things about this novel unfelicitous — not the least, the, what I experience, kind of leaden exuberance and as Brother Cheney opines, smarminess.

It occurs to me I was asked to participate in another one of Don Eduardo’s roundtable confabs — around Pynchon’s Against the Day. Which I see as having a similar tonality — also unpleasing to me

Like Kathleen, I see it as perfectly fitting that there is a panoramic range of response — exactly what makes a  convincing case for the subjectivity that attaches to fiction (and other things)

I am struck, and a bit bedazzled, by the high wattage of the illuminating discourse — which, if it signals the type of book this is, makes it even less likely for me to complete.

I noticed that Proust and Nabakov’s names were bandied about — also writers I have not (I am still trying to account for any significance to the fact I have read virtually no Updike— I have learned to offer this guitlessly) — though I would wager I have read more Nelson Algren than most people.

It is, of course, pleasing that a number of readers enjoyed this writer and have things to say and that other people have things to say about those other things. The whole point is I gather indeterminate —as the immortal Thomas Waller shrewdly observed, “One never know, do one?”

I will dip into this book, perhaps even advancing to various places in the novel — though from what I have read in the commentary, this story seems to be intricately constructed and interwoven with all manner of minute details and cutesy nomenclature. I will certainly look forward to the polylogue, as many of the contributors are people known to me to be sensible,  erudite and useful observers.