Passionate Spectator: A Novel

In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife Albertine are living in Manhattan-by the skin of their teeth. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless street corner peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business: Memoirs While You Wait, a writing service designed to satisfy the contemporary compulsion for confession and self-revelation.

That book opens into a beguiling journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (a pseudonymous restaurant reviewer who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Matthew's witty, urbane alter-ego, Bertram W. Beath-an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator" of beauty and human folly. As Peter solicits potential clients for his service, he finds that autobiography requires a measure of deception-well, lying-and that his own life depends on fictions he has created and sustained.

Eric Kraft is a novelist like no other, and his books featuring Peter Leroy create an irresistible world where poignancy and nostalgia blend with humor and unbridled invention-a world like our own, but somehow brighter, less predictable, and more fun.

Kirkus Reviews says: Kraft woolgathers with an energy that would shame a sheep-shearer, and overhearing Peter's evening conversations over martinis with the ineffable Albertine is almost as good as listening to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio again. More of the same, and may it go on forever. Mark Twain and Will Rogers would have felt right at home with the Leroys.