Inflating a Dog: The Story of Ella's Lunch Launch

by Eric Kraft

Book Overview

Peter Leroy struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping his mother's hopes and his mother's boat afloat. Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312288042
• ISBN13: 9780312288044
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

I agree! why aren't these bestsellers?

Dear Mr. Kraft-- you have a great editor but either a) a terrible publicist or b) a devotion to anonymity, or c) I can't figure out c-- do I have to?. Mr. Kraft, I don't mean to connect your works with the Harry Potter series. But, really, I don't understand why adults are not lining up at chainstores at midnight when your latest book is released. I can only believe that your modesty or shyness prevents this.So, via a review that you will probably never read, I want to say:Your books have changed my life, and the life of the twenty or more people who have shared my copies of your novels. My grandmother, aunts, uncles, family friends, and new-found friends have all been enriched by the adventures of Peter Leroy, his family, and other relations.A personal thank you.

Eric Kraft Inflates Again

There is nothing so beguiling, so mesmerizing, so mind-spinning as Inflating a Dog, at least not since Eric Kraft's last book. This book explores familiar Kraft themes: remembering and reconstructing the past (and for whose or what benefit?); desire and discovery; friendship; success and failure and what constitutes each; the nature of fiction(s). The writing is so elegant, so feather-light that you can read it too quickly, too easily, and feel that you've missed something. You have to -- you want to -- go back and read it again to make sure you've gotten it right. The book is primarily Peter Leroy's rememberances of his mother and friends but it includes bits of Peter's current adult life. The book has both hilarious and heartbreaking passages, sometimes back to back. And it is always surprising, never predictable or common. Characters from the earlier books appear and make you want to go back and remember what they were like then. Then you wonder if it goes with what they are like now, and then you wonder about the other earlier characters and what happened or will happen to them, and. . . , and. . ., and. Eric Kraft is a very inflationary writer, and to answer a question from an earlier book, he never stops (thank goodness).

Hilarious and heartbreaking

This novel continues/amplies/revises (your pick) the stories that began in "Little Follies" and continued in "Where Do You Stop," "At Home With The Glynns" and "Leaving Small's Hotel." As with all of its predecessors, "Inflating a Dog" blends wordplay and nostalgia with some serious observations on memory and coming to terms with the past. Wonderfully written and hilariously funny in the deadpan manner of Charles Portis ("True Grit," "Dog of the South"), "Inflating a Dog" is one of the very best books I've read this year.

Why aren't these bestsellers?!

Kraft's Peter Leroy books are a little sweet, a little sexy, and always funny. "Infalting" is no exception. We get Peter's exploration of his possible illegitimacy through role-playing with the sexy Patti, we get his adventures in his mother's plan for meals on the waves, and we get the usual conceit of memoir that isn't memoir. Best of all, Kraft does what so few writers are capable of doing: he entertains and he keeps your interest. You never check your watch while reading an Eric Kraft book.

Hope

Reading the book as it appeared serially online, I was, in the end, inspired by the ending. I found that Ella was working just as hard to make Peter?s life a success as Peter was working on hers, that she didn?t, perhaps, need him to give her a sense of accomplishment, as he was one of her accomplishments. This doesn?t erase the sense of failure that threatens everything in the book, but it does, for me, endorse the human spirit that refuses to accept failure. The ?common touch? that sells is also a universal effort to aspire, to hope. This is an inspiring, moving, funny tale.