Inflating a Dog
By Eric Kraft
2002
First Published
3.75
Average Rating
241
Number of Pages
Part of Series
Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally notorious girlfriend Patti in a to buy a run-down clamboat and reinvent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the beach town of Babbington, Long Island. But after Arcinella is purchased, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking—and so each night he sneaks from his home to the harborfront, where he pumps the boat dry and so inflates his mother’s hopes a bit longer.
Avg Rating
3.75
Number of Ratings
68
5 STARS
25%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Eric Kraft
Author · 14 books
Eric Kraft grew up in Babylon, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he was for a time co-owner and co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He met or invented the character Peter Leroy while dozing over a German lesson during his first year at Harvard. The following year, he married his muse, Madeline Canning; they have two sons. After earning a Master’s Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Kraft taught school in the Boston area for a while, moonlighting as a rock music critic for the Boston Phoenix. Since then, he has undertaken a variety of hackwork to support the Kraft ménage and the writing of the voluminous work of fiction that he calls The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. He has been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; was, briefly, chairman of PEN New England; and has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
