The Giant's House : a Romance

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"McCracken mixes the proper amount of lunacy with exactly the right amount of sorrow. The blend is reminiscent of such late-20th-century treasures as The Accidental Tourist, The World According to Garp , or A Confederacy of Dunces ."-- Denver Post

The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt- the "over-tall" eleven-year-old boy who's the talk of the town-walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who's ever really understood her, and as he grows- six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight-so does her heart and their most singular romance.

Praise for The Giant's House

"Remarkable . . . McCracken has wit and subtlety to burn, as well as an uncanny ability to tap into the sadness that runs through the center of her characters' worlds. This book is so lovely that, when you're reading, you'll want to sleep with it under your pillow." -- Salon

A true marvel . . . thoroughly enjoyable from its unlikely beginning to its bittersweet end. . . McCracken knows all kinds of subtle, enticing secrets of the heart and conveys them in silky, transparent language." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Lovely . . . a tribute to the quiet passion of people trapped in isolation." -- Los Angeles Times

"Fascinating . . . The reader finds herself entangled, body and soul, in this tender and endlessly strange novel, which is in all senses a hymn to human growth gone haywire and to a love so big it can't hold its own magnificent limbs upright." -- Elle

"Such is the incantatory power of McCracken's eccentric tale that by its close we are completely in the grip of its strangely conceived ardor. . . . McCracken is as original a writer as they come. . . . I fell in love." --Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

See Also I do not love mankind. People think they're interesting.  That's their first mistake.  Every retiree you meet wants to supply you with his life story. An example: thirty-five years ago a woman came into the library.  She'd just heard about oral histories, and wanted to string one together herself. "We have so many wonderful old people around," she said.  "They have such wonderful stories.  We could capture them on tape, then maybe transcribe them. Don't you think that would make a wonderful record of the area? My father, for instance, is in a nursing home--" Her father, of course.  She was not interested in the past, but her past. "If I wanted to listen to old people nattering on," I told her, "I would ride a Greyhound bus across country.  Such things get boring rather quickly, don't they." The woman looked at me with the same smile she'd had on the entire conversation.  She laughed experimentally. "Oh Miss Cort," she said.  "Surely you didn't mean that." "I did and I do," I answered.  My reputation even thirty-five years ago was already so spoiled there was no saving it.  "I really don't see the point, do you?" I felt that if those old people had some essential information they should write it down themselves.  A life story can make adequate conversation but bad history. Still, there you are in a nursing home, bored and lonely, and one day something different happens.  Instead of a gang of school kids come to bellow Christmas carols at you, there's this earnest young person with the tape recorder, wanting to know about a flood sixty years ago, or what Main Street was like, or some such nonsense.  All the other people in the home are sick to death of hearing your stories, because really let's be honest you only have a few. Suddenly there's a microphone in your face.  Wham! Just like that, you're no longer a dull conversationalist, you're a natural resource. Back then I thought, if you go around trying to rescue every fact or turn of phrase, you would never stop, you would eavesdrop until your fingers ached from playing the black keys of your tape recorder, until the batteries had gasped their last and the tape came to its end and thunked the machine off, no more, and still you would not have made a dent on the small talk of the world.  People are always downstairs, talking without you.  They gather in front of stores, run into each other at restaurants, and talk.  They clump together at parties or couple up at the dinner table.  They organize themselves by profession (for instance, waitresses), or by quality of looks or by hobby, or companion (in the case of dog owners and married people), or by sexual preference or weight or social ease, and they talk. Imagine what there is to collect: every exchange between a customer and a grocery store clerk, wrong numbers, awful baby talk to a puppy on the street, what people yell back at the radio, the sound the teenage boy outside my window makes when he catches the basketball with both his hands and his stomach, every oh lord said at church or in bed or standing up from a chair.   Thank you, hey watch it, gesundheit, who's a good boy, sweetness, how much? I love your dress. An Anthology of Common Conversation .  Already I can tell you it will be incomplete.  In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willfull misbehavior.  All those words go around and end up nowhere; your fondest wishes won't save them.  No need to be a packrat of palaver anyhow.  Best to stick with recorded history. Now, of course, I am as guilty as anyone, and this book is the evidence.  I'm worse; I know my details by heart, no interviews necessary.  No one has asked me a question yet, but I will not shut up. Peggy Cort is crazy, anyone will tell you so.  That lady who wanted to record the town's elders, the children who visited the library, my co-workers, every last soul in this town.  The only person who ever thought I wasn't is dead; he is the subject of this memoir.   Let me stop.  History is chronological, at least this one is.  Some women become librarians because they love order; I'm one.  Ordinal, cardinal, alphabetical, alphanumerical, geographical, by subject, by color, by shape, by size.  Something logical that people--one hopes--cannot botch, although they will. This isn't my story. Let me start again. I do not love mankind, but he was different. He was a redhead as a child. You won't hear that from most people.  Most people won't care.  But he had pretty strawberry blond hair.  If he'd been out in the sun more, it would have been streaked gold. He first came into my library in the fall of 1950, when he was eleven.  Some teacher from the elementary school brought them all trooping in; I was behind the desk, putting a cart of fiction in order.  I thought at first he was a second teacher, he was so much taller than the rest, tall even for a grown man.  Then I noticed the chinos and white bucks and saw that this was the over-tall boy I'd heard about.  Once I realized, I could see my mistake; though he would eventually develop cheekbones and whiskers, now he was pale and slightly babyfaced.  He wasn't the tallest man in the world then, just a remarkably tall boy.  Doctors had not yet prescribed glasses, and he squinted at faraway objects in a heroic way, as if they were new countries waiting to be discovered. "This is Miss Cort," the teacher said, gesturing at me.  "Ask her any question you want.  She is here to help you.  That is what librarians do." She showed them the dusty oak card catalog, the dusty stacks, the circulation desk I spent hours keeping free of dust. In short, she terrified them. "Fiction is on the third floor," she said.  "And biography is on the second." I recognized her; she read Georgette Heyer and biographies of royalty and returned books so saturated with cigarette smoke I imagined she exhaled over each page on purpose.  I wanted to stand by the exit to whisper in every eleven-year-old ear, Just come back.  Come back by yourself and we'll forget all about this. At the end of the visit, the tall boy came up to talk.  He seemed studious, though studious is too often the word we give to quiet odd people. "I want a book," he said, "about being a magician." "What sort of magician?" I said.  "Like Merlin?" Recently a teacher had read aloud from The Sword and the Stone, and they all wanted more stories. "No," he said.  He put his hands on the circulation desk.  His fingernails were cleaner than an ordinary eleven-year-old's; his mother was then still alive. "Just tricks," he said.  "I want to make things look like they disappear.  I looked in the card catalog under magic, but I didn't find anything." "Try 'conjuring,'" I told him. We found only one book, an oversized skinny volume called Magic for Boys and Girls.   He took it to a table in the front room.  He wasn't clumsy, as you might expect, but terribly delicate.  His hands were large, out of proportion even with his big body, and he had to use them delicately to accomplish anything at all. I watched his narrow back as he read the book.  After an hour I walked over. "Is that the sort of thing you wanted?" I asked. "Yes," he said, not looking at me.  The book was opened flat on the table in front of him, and he worked his hands in the air according to the instructions, without any props.  His fingers kept slowly snatching at nothing, as if he had already made dozens of things disappear, rabbits and cards and rubber balls and bouquets of paper flowers, and had done this so brilliantly even he could not bring them back. I may be adding things.  It's been years now, and nearly every day I dream up hours and meetings with James Carlson Sweatt.  I am a librarian, and you cannot stop me from annotating, revising, updating.  I like to think that--because I am a librarian--I offer accurate and spurious with no judgment, good and bad next to each other on the shelf.  But my memories are not books.  Blessing if they were.  Then maybe someone would borrow one and keep it too long and return it, a little battered, offering money for my forgiveness, each memory new after its long absence. My memories are not books.  They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up.  Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words.  The meaning's the same, the meter's identical.  When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong. What I give you is the day's edition.  Tomorrow it may be different. Excerpted from The Giant's House: A Romance by Elizabeth McCracken All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The plot of McCracken's eloquent and hauntingly beautiful first novel is fairy-tale simple: A young librarian meets an overgrown boy who is destined to become the world's tallest man. She falls in love with him, though he is doomed to die young. The events of the novel span eight years beginning in 1950. McCracken convincingly portrays the period, deploying a few telling details‘the fold-down seat of a Nash Rambler, New York City's Automat, the snappy patter of journalists‘rather than reckless ornamentation. Narrator Peggy Cort is the library director of Brewsterville, a Massachusetts town "halfway up the spit curl of the Cape." James Carlson Sweatt is 11 and "tall even for a grown man." The title refers to the house that is built in James's backyard to accommodate his prodigious size. Peggy holds her love for James close to her heart, partly because of the scandal that might result but mostly out of fear that it would go unreciprocated. The theme of carrying a secret love is resolved ingeniously in a surprising and satisfying ending. This is a teriffic first novel, and McCracken is definitely a writer to watch. Highly recommended. [For more on this book see "Librarian Falls for Pituitary Giant," p. 165.‘Ed.]‘Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A platonic, decorous and achingly poignant love affair between a young man who suffers from gigantism and a librarian who is 14 years his senior is the focus of this remarkable debut novel. McCracken is not merely a born raconteur; she is also an assured stylist and an astute student of human nature. Narrator Peggy Cort, spinster librarian in a small town on Cape Cod, first becomes aware of James Sweatt when he comes into the library with his grade-school class. At age 11, James is already 6'2" and destined to keep growing. Peggy finds herself drawn to the gentle, lonely young man, both because he fills a void in her own life and because she is in effect adopted by James's loving but eccentric family. The reader is mesmerized by this low-key narrative, first lured by Peggy's alternately acerbic and tender voice, then captivated by James's situation and intrigued by his family, later engulfed by pathos as James's body begins to fail and, finally, amazed by a turn of events that ends the novel with a major surprise. McCracken also invests the narrative with humor, sometimes through Peggy's astringent comments and more often through the use of minor characters who add vivid color and their own distinctive voices. One thinks of Anne Tyler's Illumination Night as the closest comparison to this brilliantly imagined chronicle of a peculiar, unique relationship. And like Tyler, McCracken (who also wrote the well-reviewed short-story collection Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry), shows herself a wise and compassionate reader of the human heart. BOMC selection. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

YA-As a librarian, Peggy Cort is fully able to provenance the quotation "Whoever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight." But she finds it impossible to establish why, at 26 years of age, she is so instantly obsessed by James Sweatt from his first appearance across her desk. He is 11 years old, overly tall, with a faraway look and unusual interests that bring him often into her Cape Cod reading room. This is an unusual story of fascination developing into an abiding, supportive devotion. James is far from average. By the age of 19 he is over 8 feet tall, the giant of the title. So unique is he in his physical form that he carries with him only a vague and disturbing medical prognosis. His adolescence in a 1950s small town is as gently average as his extraordinary physical demands can render it. Supported by the loving acceptance of family and community, James would yet have been isolated but for Peggy's singular recognition of him as her someone to cherish and nurture. With nothing of the freak about it, this is an involving and moving romance.-Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Library System, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Although displaying the same gift for language and compassion for misfits that were reflected in her short story collection Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry? (1994), McCracken's first novel is a not-altogether-successful story of two lonely people who meet in a small Massachusetts town. At 25, acerbic librarian Peggy Cort has pretty much resigned herself to a loveless spinsterhood until she meets James Sweatt, whose malfunctioning endocrine glands have turned him, at age 11, into an "over-tall" boy. During the next 10 years, as James grows up (literally) to become the tallest man in the world, Peggy's world gradually narrows to a focus on ensuring James' well-being. She discovers that love can appear unexpectedly; it involves leaps into the unknown and offers no guarantees of happy endings. A major problem with this promising novel is its problematic character development. The only fully developed character is Peggy. James never seems quite real; and the supporting characters--James' mother, aunt, and uncle--are so one-dimensional that their purpose in the novel seems questionable. In addition, the ending is rushed and unsatisfactory. Still, this tender and eccentric romance should be read if for no other reason than getting to know Peggy, whose voice is self-deprecating, intelligent, and always ruefully honest. --Nancy Pearl

Kirkus Book Review

McCracken's eccentric debut tale of a prim librarian's secret passion for the town giant presents an intriguing premise--one that is finally muted, unfortunately, by the excessively restrained tone of the narrator. Peggy Court, the newly appointed librarian to a small Cape Cod town in the 1950s, first meets James Carlson Sweatt when, as a six feet two inches tall 11-year-old, he is part of a school field trip to her circulation desk. A bright, curious boy, James immediately wins Peggy's icy heart, and they build a relationship based on a mutual interest--the pursuit of knowledge. As he grows older (and taller by the year--James suffers from a form of giantism in which the person never stops growing), and after the suicide of his mother, the two forge a rather curious bond. Lonely, bitter Peggy, ostensibly part caretaker, part mother figure, is in reality the one in need: Charismatic James, it seems, has plenty of friends and interests and, in fact, saves Peggy from her misanthropic self. Though James lives happily with his aunt and uncle, Peggy becomes obsessed during their ten-year relationship with James's needs, having a proportionate house and furniture built for him, and a car modified for his size. She sees to his medical problems, accompanies him on promotional tours, and chaperons his one-week stint as a headliner for the circus. Though their ``romance'' is the novel's concern, Peggy, narrating in flashbacks, is overly protective of her memories and vague as to the parameters of her love, thereby excluding the reader from a deeper engagement. Finally, after James's inevitably young death, the story takes a bizarre turn when Peggy has a one-night stand with James's grieving father, then claims that the child from that union was fathered by James. A promising idea, ultimately disappointing in execution: McCracken's first novel lacks the one aspect vital to its success- -concern for the lovers. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)