Albertine’s Overcoat is the eleventh novel in Kraft’s voluminous work of fiction, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. In Albertine’s Overcoat, Peter Leroy looks back to his high school days in the early 1960s from the context of his present life in the recent past—around the time when television went digital. The citizens of Babbington, New York, think that Peter is a daring aviator, maybe even the nation’s most daring aviator—at least in the teenage division—but the limelight and adulation are changing him, and not for the better. He’s in danger of becoming an arrogant, insufferable little egoist. 
 Then something happens that saves him. He falls in love with Albertine Gaudet.
 Almost at once, almost “at first sight,” he realizes that Albertine would make a far better center for his life than he would himself. That is the end of egoism—and the start of one of literature’s great romances. Indefatigable memoirist that he is, Leroy doesn’t merely tell the story of his wooing and winning Albertine. He interweaves that story with an account of the troubles that beset him during the writing of the story of his wooing and winning her. 
 Among the obstacles to completing the story (and this book) are self-doubt, procrastination, and the demanding clients for his memoir-ghost-writing service Memoirs While You Wait—but that’s not all. He begins getting telephone calls intended for a local business, Peerless Television Service and Repair. 
 These oddly compelling calls lure him out of the isolation of his writing room and into the lives of the callers. With compassion and humor he listens to their woeful tales of the troubles they’ve had trying to get Peerless to repair their television sets. The result is a poignant, thoughtful meditation on the frustrations of everyday life, the used-television market, cultural elitism, the transitory nature of fame and success, persistence, loyalty, the weight of a promise, loss and grief, responsibility, the vanity of human wishes, luck, realism, and romance.