At Home with the Glynns

Peter Leroy, hotel owner in the town of Babbington, Long Island (``clam capital of America''), offers further marvelously appealing recollections of his boyhood misadventures of the mid-1950s. Readers unfamiliar with the earlier Leroy novels (What a Piece of Work I Am, etc.) will find Kraft's wry style, deep insights into youth and age and sly observation of adult behavior a rare delight. Peter's life at ages 11 and 12 revolves around his slightly bohemian neighbors--abstract painter Andy Glynn, his talkative wife Rosetta, a melancholy poet and compulsive entrant of product-promotion giveaway contests, and their forward, mischievous 13-year-old daughters, Margot and Martha. Peter's relationship with the Glynn sisters proceeds from dates spent watching arty European films to secret nighttime rendezvous in which he climbs the Glynns' stone wall and slips undressed into ``the twins'"" bed for relatively uneventful trysts that inflame his prepubescent fantasies. Anyone who has mourned, or yearned for, his or her younger self will find Kraft an enchantment. (May)