Featured Reading Guide
Elizabeth McCracken
The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod 28 year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels as if love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt – the ‘over-tall’ 11 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. 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 foot, then eight – so does her heart and their most singular romance. THE GIANT’S…
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Elizabeth McCracken was born in Boston in 1966. Since the age of 15 she has been a librarian first at the Newton (Mass.) Free Library, then the University of Pennsylvania humanities and social science library. She was the Circulation Desk Chief at the Somerville (Mass.) Public Library until the fall of 1995. She has had fellowships from the University of Iowa; the Michener Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Somerville Arts Council; and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was twice a fellow. Her work has been shortlisted for the National Book Award and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also honoured as one of Granta’s 20 Best American Writers Under 40.
topAbout the Book
The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod 28 year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels as if love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt – the ‘over-tall’ 11 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. 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 foot, then eight – so does her heart and their most singular romance. THE GIANT’S HOUSE is a strange, beautifully written and unforgettably tender novel about learning to welcome the unexpected miracle.
topElizabeth McCracken interview/review
“I’m trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like I’m blurbing The Bridges of Madison County,” says Elizabeth McCracken. “I think that our lives are constantly transformed by love. Not just by what we think of as romantic love — you know, love with the person you sleep with. But that our daily lives are constantly shaped by the people we love: our friends, our families.“
That’s but one of the leitmotifs of The Giant’s House, McCracken’s singularly inventive first novel about a Cape Cod librarian named Peggy Cort. Twenty-five-year-old Peggy is not the sort of person to attract much notice. “I was the town librarian — less a woman than a piece of civic furniture, like a polling machine at town hall, or a particularly undistinguished WPA mural.” But you should notice Peggy. Not out of pity, but because she’s a marvel, though an often misguided one.
Peggy’s 29-year-old creator sees her unconventional protagonist as remarkable, but no more remarkable than the millions of other Peggys who make up humanity and whose lives go unnoticed. “I believe that most people are extraordinary,” says McCracken… “To me that is one of the pleasures of fiction: getting to know characters in a complex way — in a way that you sometimes don’t get to know mere acquaintances.“
But Peggy is not an easy woman to get to know, at least not to the patrons of her library. The first words out of her mouth are, “I do not love mankind. People think they’re interesting. That’s their first mistake.” For years she has kept people at a distance. She doesn’t have friends, just library patrons. “Her social skills are not the best,” concedes McCracken with a laugh.
But beneath Peggy’s often acerbic demeanour beats the heart of a generous soul and bruised romantic. “I think to a large extent cynics are disappointed romantics, or embarrassed romantics,” says McCracken.
Peggy is in fact a compassionate sort who treasures her interaction with her patrons and longs to be needed. But over the years she has come to feel neglected, and at 25 she has already given up on love. “For years I’d waited for someone to love me: that was the permission I needed to fall in love myself, as though I were a pin sunk deep in a purse, waiting for a magnet to prove me metal. When that did not happen, I’d thought of myself as UNLOVABLE.”
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Both James and Peggy are apparent misfits in a small American town. How far does McCracken play with our ideas of normality in the novel? If James and Peggy are misfits how are they also ‘normal’, and what does this ‘normal’ mean?
- Cynical of those who wish to impart their life histories to everyone they meet, Peggy nevertheless has a compulsion to tell her story.Is McCracken commenting on the basic human will to record, and why is it important that Peggy does so?
- Peggy’s love for James is romantic, but McCracken does not at the same time shirk from the real or mundane. She does not dwell on the scenarios or emotions we might find in a melodramatic or predictable love story. What affect do these details have on our perception of Peggy’s love? Do these add
or detract from the ‘romance’ of the novel?
- Place plays an important part in the novel, as indicated by the title. Peggy’s library, her flat above her tragically lonely landlord’s, Caroline and Oscar’s house and James’s cottage are all places where action central to the story is played out. What happens when the events move outside these confines and into the less controlled environment of the ‘real’ world?
- Emotionally, James is the age he is and craves the companionship of his contemporaries, yet physically he has far surpassed even a fully grown man. How do the conflicts of emotions and physicality both cloud and enrich James’s life?
- How do we feel when Peggy sleeps with James’s father towards the end of the novel – appalled or supportive? Does morality play a part in this novel?
Other Books by Elizabeth McCracken
An Exact Replica of a Figment…
This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. A prize-…
Niagara Falls All Over Again…
Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home…
Suggested Further Reading
- Saint Maybe ~ Anne Tyler
- Where I’m Calling From ~ Raymond Carver
- Independence Day ~ Richard Ford
- Because it is Bitter, And Because it is My Heart ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- The Shipping News ~ E. Annie Proulx