Topical Guide 155
Mark Dorset
Food: Preferences: Chicken versus Clams
Food: In Popular Culture
“Are you having chicken?” I asked Al.
If I remember correctly, she said, “Yes.”
“Maybe I’ll have chicken too.” I said.
She said nothing, I think.
“Or maybe I’ll have clams,” I said.
She said something that I couldn’t quite make out. A waitress, Dianne, one of my favorites, arrived. Al ordered. I hesitated. Albertine said—and I’ll be forever in her debt for this—“You have to choose: chicken or clams.”Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
Reality, Real and Fictional
When I was in the fifth grade, I competed in two memorable contests. One was a contest to name a new elementary school in Babbington. The other was a contest for the affections of Veronica McCall. I lost both.
As I worked on “Take the Long Way Home,” I changed, among other things, the outcome of one of these contests: the name-the-school contest. In the pages that follow, I win. …
I would have changed the outcome of the other contest if I could have, but I couldn’t. The reasons for my losing Veronica were so deeply rooted in fact, in history, in the social fabric of Babbington, that to deny them, to try to alter them, would have meant trying to create a new social history, and since that seemed like more than I could do, I decided to stick to the facts.Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
Preview
In “Take the Long Way Home,” Peter Leroy returns in memory to the fifth grade, where he finds himself gazing at Veronica McCall across the Gulf of Puberty. Remembering Veronica, the hottest little number in Babbington's elementary grades at that time, inevitably leads him to reflect on the many varieties of love and lust to which the human animal is subject; to consider the roots of the animosity between Babbington's clamdiggers and chicken-farmers; to recall the occasion of his first meeting Porky White, who was to become the brains behind the Kap’n Klam chain of bivalve-based fast-food restaurants; and forces him to recreate his attempt to skate on ice.
Reviewing “Take the Long Way Home” in Baltimore’s City Paper on January 11, 1985, John Strausbaugh wrote:
Kraft has constructed a complete comic universe, an American Macondo. He calls it Babbington, a seaside community on “Bolotomy Bay,” somewhere on Long Island. . . . By “Take the Long Way Home,” Peter has reached the [fifth] grade. He faces one of those crucial dilemmas of young manhood — whether to take a girl to the roller rink or spend the money on a gas-powered model airplane. . . . He resolves the conflict by a strategem so complex and dumb it works.
Gentle irony, deadpan understatement and a wistful but self-mocking sentimentality are the hallmarks of Kraft’s humor. The people and institutions of Babbington are all finally ludicrous — the Babbington Clam Council, the Babbington Central Upper Elementary School, and every dad’s favorite magazine, Impractical Craftsman. . . . Kraft never provokes savage mockery or brutal sneers, but quiet, sweetly melancholy smiles of recognition. . . .
One suspects and hopes that the Peter Leroy saga will amble on at its own pace for several years to come. You can leap into it at any time, or go back and read from the beginning. Each [novella] takes about an hour to zip through and they’re addictive as salted peanuts.
See also: Prefaces TG 2
[more to come on Monday, December 20, 2021]
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.