AT HOME WITH THE GLYNNS

Another installment in the ever-expanding chronicle of Kraft's fictional universe, this gently provocative novel uses a boy's delicious dalliance with two sisters to serve up the author's true passion: Deep Questions about the nature of art and memory. Speaking as usual through his narrator and stand-in Peter Leroy, Kraft (Where Do You Stop?, 1992, etc.) invites us to spend time with the Glynns, out-of-place bohemians in Babbington, Long Island. Andy is a painter and art teacher; his wife, Rosetta, a melancholy poet; their twin daughters, Margot and Martha, are precocious 14-year-olds who want to entice young Peter into a mÇnage Ö trois. The plot, such as it is, pits Kraft/Leroy's digressive tendencies against the reader's fond hopes that the book will live up to the promise of its early sexual-initiation scene, a model of the genre. A key digression is Andy's search for classical visual archetypes—e.g., the ``pure'' watermelon—a quest that captures Peter's imagination shortly after he consummates his relationship with the twins. The fact that the Glynns are Middle European exiles hiding under assumed names, that the twins' ``foreplay'' consists of having Peter act out the plots of the foreign films they see at the local art house, and that Peter's involvement with the girls will eventually resemble the plots of the movies he sees—well, that's the kind of High Fun to be found in Kraft's self-referential but never boring Art. Meanwhile, Leroy will be everywhere this spring: Picador is issuing all Kraft's previous fiction in paperback, while Voyager is producing an interactive electronic version of the complete Peter Leroy saga. Kraft's latest, sexy-sweet novel devolves into a perfect madeleine—dissolving just as you bite into it, leaving an insatiable desire for more.