Passionate Spectator : A Novel

In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife Albertine are living by the skin of their teeth in Manhattan. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business: Memoirs While You Wait. That book opens into a beguiling journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Peter's witty, urbane alter-ego, Bertram W. Beath--an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator"of life's pageant.

“The only American author since Pynchon to completely erase the line between the literary novel and the spit-out-your-coffee comedy.” —The Washington Post

“The novel playfully riffs on Proust and the Nabokov of Pale Fire, and its denouement touches on The Odyssey and 'Jack in the Beanstalk.' That the book also manages to entertain the neophyte is a credit to Kraft's colorful incisive prose and off-kilter wit.” —Time Out (New York )

“Kraft manages to spin one delicate yarn after another by mixing a dollop of plot with observations, asides, offbeat humor, and an abiding and infectious enthusiasm.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune