The Giant’s House: A Romance
By Elizabeth McCracken
Avon Books, 290 pages, $12
It is a real — and rare — pleasure to come across a book that is not only filled with original writing but is the product of an original idea from an original mind. Much writing seems original, and appears to embody a fresh idea, but, on closer inspection, we find merely flashy wrapping paper around a recycled gift. How much more wonderful is it to find both genuinely beautiful paper and a treasure inside?
Elizabeth McCracken’s “The Giant’s House: A Romance” is this treasure: a fascinating idea (spinster librarian falls in love with giant teenager) executed with a superbly confident writing style. Intense and emotionally angular librarian Peggy Cort narrates this strange romance, circa 1950. Certainly a librarian is aware of the fairy-tale-like aspects of falling in love with a giant, but Peggy’s honest narrative is simultaneously magical and firmly situated in the real world–no mean feat for McCracken. This romance is about love, but it is also about Peggy’s aching need to be needed: “It was this I’d waited for all my life: a love that would make me useful, a love that would occupy all my time.” The object of her need is James Sweatt, the Giant of Cape Cod; he is as lonely in his body as she is in the world. Nothing fits his body, and nothing but James fits Peggy’s heart. Their love is almost always unspoken but is no less deep for the silence.
Numerous passages describe James’ ever-changing height and weight, the dimensions of his specially made clothes and furniture: “I want to describe his feet, now (he was eighteen) size thirty-seven, triple A. The store in Hyannis still made his shoes. I’d had to call and ask them to rush and make a new pair to replace the old ones.” These homely details are the world to Peggy, their solidity connects her to James and, through him, to everything else. Hers is a nature both shy and generous, a mind clever and critical (“I do not love mankind. People think they’re interesting. That’s their first mistake.”). She makes no apologies for her quick judgments and her eccentricities, and she does not spare herself any criticism; she inspects herself as coolly as she inspects everything around her and concludes, “I am a fundamentally sad person, a fundamentally unlovable person.” Her sadness is the universal sadness of loneliness, and her remedy of a love that is useful makes the reader love her.
In this fairy tale for adults, the giant’s house is a shelter, and the heroine is no helpless damsel. Turning convention on its head, McCracken (author of the 1994 collection “Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry”) brilliantly weaves two genres into a mesmerizing first novel.
