The Giant's House

A freak, a circus oddity, a Cape Cod attraction or a young man facing the outside world....Who is this guy as seen through the eyes and heart of the local librarian? The bigger question is what is Peggy Cort, a thirty-something librarian, doing falling for a teenage boy? A well-written 90's "romance" novel by a new novelist, Elizabeth McCracken; and yes, she is a librarian. A poignant discovery of a woman's honest story of where her heart leads her. A great summer reading book that is good anytime of the year. I gave it a nine! The 290 pages flew by!

The Giant's House is a biography of James Carlson Sweatt, a young man afflicted with giantism. Six feet tall at the age of eleven, James reaches a height of eight feet seven inches before he passes away. James' biographer is Peggy Cort, a librarian, who, until she meets James, is in danger of living a life of loneliness and quiet desperation. Peggy tells the tale of James'short life, chronicling the many triumphs and heartbreaks. She also describes the bond between her and the gentle giant, an attachment which grows into a deep, abiding love.

Reminiscent of the best of Ray Bradbury, and of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, The Giant's House is an outstanding achievement. McCracken has a keen eye for descriptive detail, especially small town life. It's probably not for everyone, but if you value good writing, give it a try.

Premise of the story was interesting. Characters were likable enough although could have been more developed. Didn't like the ending. It felt that their relationship was building along nicely and then suddenly it's done!

What a super story. McCracken delivers such beautiful prose in this novel, I actually had to reread some chapters as I finished them. These are words worth savoring, delightfully delivered through metaphors.
Giant is a story of TRUE romance. Hang up those Harlequins and read a story that will touch your soul and make you a believer in real love and emotion. McCracken has taken two characters and thrown in a bundle of troublesome issues to make the reltionship doomed (the boy's size, their difference in age, etc) yet moves the characters closer together and shows that the bonds of love can cross any boundaries.
Buy this one and keep it. You'll want to read it again. Trust me.

After starting out very strongly, the novel left me feeling, like the heroine of the novel, Peggy Cort, flat-footed. It begins on such a promising note, with wry, amusing commentary provided by Peggy on the inhabitants of her small Massachusetts town, and their small-mindedness in the presence of James Sweatt, who eventually becomes the world's tallest man.
James becomes the destination of many people's pilgrimages. They come to see him, to gawk at his size, and most of them leave with only a sense of his height, rather than a sense of his humanity. However, McCracken's writing doesn't offer us much more of a look into James Sweatt than an external one. I found myself brutally aware of James height almost constantly. Surely, if we are going to come to know James by the end of the novel, we should be able to think of him as someone more than just the world's tallest man. We are not able to get beyond the external any more than most of the people in James' life, and this seems to be a weak point in the novel. Peggy, despite her role as narrator and ultimately, as the source of all information about James, continually places herself between us and James. She does an inadequate job of showing us the inner James Sweatt, reducing us to the category of tourists that she condemns as people who come to gawk, take a picture or two, and then leave only aware of what a tall person James is.
However, despite Peggy's continual insistence that this story is not about her, she is the real object of our attentions. She builds the home that houses the giant, both literally and figuratively. She creates a museum, a library of James Sweatt, and we find ourselves learning much more about Peggy than we do about James in the process. What we see of Peggy forces us to ask ourselves questions about the different ways that we make outcasts of ourselves and of others.
Overall, I would say that the novel was a joy to read, despite what I think is a weakness in keeping us at a giant arm's length from James.

I liked Elizabeth McCracken's short stories for the same reason I like this novel, her ability to bring sympathy and humor to the lives of slightly odd people, people on the fringes of society. I admire her for her loyalty to these people and for caring about them. In her short stories, she characteristically manages to give them a redeeming gesture at the end, a token of her affection. In this novel, however, Ms. McCracken tries but cannot quite pull it off.
Peggy Cort is a small town librarian who wants to love but has waited most of her life for permission to fall in love. Love deposits its gifts all around her but passes herself by; why this is so is not clear, but it is clear that she is cut off from "normal" society. She eventually gives herself permission to love, but then it is with a boy whose most significant connection to her, finally, is that he is also cut off from normal life, for endocrinologic reasons. He dies young, as by natural law he must, and she must content herself with scant memories of a large boy. The McCracken bravado and humor are intact, but in the end she could not pull the trick, there is no convincing redemption for Peggy Cort, no brave front for her to put up for the world.
Perhaps it is unfair to criticize a fiction writer for being too true to life, but in Elizabeth McCracken's case, because she deals with those who are outside, whose lives are defined by lack, it is simply too painful to let them remain without. It would be too true to life.

M. Turpin
This amazing novel takes place in a New England tourist town where summers are unimportant: "In the dark privacy of winter Brewsterville's citizens were more likely to drink, weep, have affairs, tell off-color jokes, let themselves go." Similarly, the book's protagonist and narrator, Peggy Court, is a woman who lives silently, in the darkness of her own self-hatred. What makes this book captivating and upbeat is that Court finds her way out of her own darkness, and she does it by forging paths few others would imagine. "I wanted," the character says, "to out-Houdini Houdini, but in reverse. I wanted not to escape, but to enter, to insinuate myself into the smallest places in that house ... I wanted to get myself so caught they'd have to let me stay. Look, they'd say, how did she manage that? That space isn't big enough for anyone. Look at her: she's surely trapped."
McCracken is a rare combination: she writes like a poet, but has a gift for illustrious, fascinating characters. Her first-person narrator is so vivid and constant, that despite her obvious shortsightedness, you very quickly find yourself perceiving the universe unself-consciously through her eyes. Peggy Court is a woman so hollowed out by loneliness that even socks seem lucky to her because "Socks mate for life." She sees herself as unlovable, and describes herself as waiting for love "as though I were a pin sunk deep in a purse, waiting for a magnet to prove me metal." She is also a person oblivious to her rare ability to dismiss flaws in others and to value them despite their quirks: She warms to another woman because "I've always found a certain sullenness comforting," and says of her, "Even now I remember Mrs. Sweatt as the embodiment of every sad love song ever written; she believed every musical statement of what love did to you when it went wrong, how it was like a poison without an antidote, how you'd never breathe right again. Most people feel that way only when the music plays; all her days, Mrs. Sweatt's heat was tuned to some radio frequency crammed with tragedy."
None of the characters in this novel are important people - and none of them are ordinary. First of all, there's the giant, James Sweatt, who accepts his life-threatening condition with alternate offerings of resignation and anger, whose gigantism renders him frequently homebound, and who consequently is someone who "loved what you could get through the mail. Eventually he had dozens of degrees from correspondence schools and was a mail-order minister several times over." McCracken never lets her pen slip - she brings every character vividly to life. Even the lesser characters seem destined to stay with you permanently.
McCracken has a flair for rich dialogue, and this is nowhere more evident than in those passages where she allows the minor characters Leila (a chance encounter from a circus, the smallest woman in the world), and James's father, Mr. Sweat, to talk themselves into existence. A Giant's House is full of profound, seemingly casual reflections on the nature of love, and Mr. Sweat, who abandoned his son in childhood, and thus describes himself ruefully as " the opposite of an orphan," tells us about himself: "[P]eople become immune to love the way they become immune to any disease. Either they had it bad early in life, like chicken pox, and that's that; or they keep getting exposed to it in little doses and build up an immunity; or somehow they just don't catch it, something in `em is born resistant. I'm the last type. I'm immune to love and poison ivy."
McCracken is a writer to watch - she surely deserved to be named by Granta as one of the 20 Best Young American Novelists, and this book heartily merited its nomination for the National Book Award.

Having read the previous reviews of Ms. McCracken's novel, I have a guess at the root of the diverging opinions. If you are confident, extroverted, and draw energy from being around other people, this novel will seem slow and uneventful, and the characters will not draw you in. If, on the other hand, you are more strongly empathetic, introverted, and gain strength from your own reserves before you turn to others, I think you will love this book. You can guess which category I happen to fall into.
I wrote this review to point out one item that both parties should be able to agree on: Ms. McCracken writes beautifully in a fundamental way; I felt as though almost every sentence carried some delight of thought or phrasing worth rereading or remembering. In a time when we have authors like Elizabeth Wurzel admitting her own work is at times incoherent, and written on speed, and selling on the basis of a racy cover, Elizabeth McCracken's prose is simple, quiet, filled with love, and true. I can understand questions about plot developments, but Ms. McCracken has an unusual ability to move through her story will surehanded phrasing. She's worth reading.

Although I thought the premise of the novel--a small town librarian falling in love with a giant teenager--was really fascinating, I found myself feeling empty at the end of the book. Peggy Court felt very flat to me as a character, and we hardly got to know James at all. The ending was highly unsatisfactory. Dotty should never have been. An interesting read, but not something I would enthusiastically recommend.

Elizabeth McCraken has woven a most wonderful tale of bittersweet love between a small town boy-giant and a librarian, fourteen years his senior. Peggy Cort and James Sweatt are at first an unlikely pair, but through closer investigation of their relationship it appears they are a perfect match. McCracken has crafted a delightfully unique story that will not be soon forgotten. I can't say much more for fear of spoiling the secret of this hidden gem of a book.

Elizabeth McCracken brings her characters to life in this extraordinary tale of a teenage boy with the body of a giant and the heart of a child. James Sweatt, world's largest man, and Peggy Cort, world's most idiosyncratic librarian, create a relationship that is heartwarming, peculiar, and incredibly entertaining.

Peggy Cort, very much alone and awkward all her life, is immediately fascinated with James. Unlike the public, forever gaping at his towering build, Peggy is drawn to the way he speaks, the things he says, the way he lives. Regardless of her fourteen year seniority over James, the two begin to form a captivating relationship.

This is a story of romance, of humor, and of the connections people can generate. From the first time Peggy catches sight of the eleven year old, six foot two child, she finds a certain connection, a correlation, a bond that she has been waiting for all her life. She's fourteen years older, three and a half feet shorter, yet she is still the only person who can really see James, eye to eye.

Elizabeth McCracken does a fabulous job illustrating these perfectly developed characters. This book flashes glimpses of so many different worlds and pespectives. The author captivates the reader with the strong sense of eccentricity hidden inside each and every lovable character.

The premise seems interesting, and the portrait of Peggy is an unusual and touching one, but the love story is difficult to invest in, become involved in. James is not a well-developed character, so the reader's understanding of the love between them is one-sided. In addition, the ending seems rushed, out of character, and not quite believable. It left me feeling like the story deserved better than that ending.

VOICE. This is a book not everyone will enjoy, but, if you want to read a novel with an outstanding voice, then this is the one! It's true, the main character, Peggy, is irritating without fault, and the character James seems flat; but the voice the author captures is real. If you read it, don't get caught up in the plot, just remember that the author did a wonderful job of capturing the voice of Peggy.

I really enjoyed this book. The whole premise is very creative - a 1950s relationship between a librarian and a student, 13 years her junior. People just don't write about stuff like that. :-) In the end, you realize how much the librarian changed, but didn't change at the same time. One bright light shown in her life for the decade, and her life was forever altered, but then she went back to being the same ole recluse she was before the giant came into her life. I wish things had turned out differently for our romantic pair, but...

A good, interesting and well written book. A very surprising ending ....held my interest most the time.
Wished there had been more of love relationship between Peggy and James physically ..since u so wanted that to
Materialize ..but their relationship was still very interesting. Very insightful!

I really enjoyed this book. The whole premise is very creative - a 1950s relationship between a librarian and a student, 13 years her junior. People just don't write about stuff like that. :-) In the end, you realize how much the librarian changed, but didn't change at the same time. One bright light shown in her life for the decade, and her life was forever altered, but then she went back to being the same ole recluse she was before the giant came into her life. I wish things had turned out differently for our romantic pair, but...

A good, interesting and well written book. A very surprising ending ....held my interest most the time.
Wished there had been more of love relationship between Peggy and James physically ..since u so wanted that to
Materialize ..but their relationship was still very interesting. Very insightful!

Although I read this book very recently, I have been aware of it since it was published many years ago. I thought the concept was intriguing, but I had no idea it would be so boring and ineptly executed. There is a pervasive creepiness to it that is impossible to shake ... or forget. That is, I suppose, a kind of success, but the impression left by this story of a lonely and unremarkable woman in love with a nice boy afflicted with pituitary giantism simply does not ring true. James (the giant) is made to seem sweet and loveable, yes, but Peggy, the librarian who insists she's in love with him (and can even identify the moment when she realized she was), is a self-absorbed, strange, and very distasteful character. Her "love" for James is more like a desire to be associated with something (or someone) extraordinary, than genuine regard and affection.

The twist at the end -- having Peggy sleep with Calvin (James's rather unappealing father) -- is tacked on without any sense of preparation, or suspense. The fact that Calvin, who has been estranged from his son for most of the boy's life, reveals himself to James during earlier scenes in New York, is not revealed to the reader (!!) until the end. When Calvin shows up after James's death, Peggy's tryst with him is precipitous, unappetizing and pointless.

Then, with only a few pages to go, Peggy's resulting pregnancy is made to seem oddly mysterious. Who is the father? James (from the one night they spent in the same bed), or Calvin? It's not really possible to care. Then, only 2-3 pages go by and the child (James's daughter? Calvin's daughter?) is 25 and living in Chicago, completely uninterested in keeping in touch with Peggy, her mother.

As the title of this review states: this is a poorly-done trainwreck of a novel -- it is without plot, character, conflict, suspense. The cutesy Writing-School similes and faux-poetical phrases are annoying and unnecessary. Actually, the creepiness itself is the most interesting element here but it is not consistent, not well developed. There's even a chance that the author didn't know it was there! But had she known, and had the ability to develop it skillfully (doubtful), she might have had a different -- and a much more interesting -- story to tell.

So promising I could hardly wait to read it! McCracken's prose is beautiful, no doubt. The story, however, left me feeling cold,and wanting more of James. Why the father at the.end? Could have done without. I feel cheated, somehow...I keep wanting to resume the already finished book

James shares several things in common with Robert Wadlow, who really WAS the tallest man who ever lived: the unstoppable growth, the shoe-company work, the circus appearances, the dangerous (and ultimately lethal) infections in his lower extremities, & the death at the beginning of adulthood (Wadlow died at 22).

That Wadlow is not mentioned in the novel at all, even though other famous giants are (including Jack Earle, who would have been a contemporary of the fictional James), suggests that Wadlow's story was a significant source of inspiration for this wonderful novel.

The book was beautifully written. It focused on Peggy, the main character, and her reactions and relationships to others. The other characters are not well-developed; they reflect Peggy's perspective. I think it successfully portrayed how someone who finds it difficult to get close to others eventually does, in an untraditional way. The ending was very disappointing, as if the author was unable to find a logical conclusion. A better ending, and I would have rated it five stars.

Dynamic tension between reality and hyperbole bound me to this book. The relationship between Peggy and James is frought between taboo and pure innocence; James' physical enormity and Peggy's innocuous presence; her righteous pursuit and his quiet resignation. McCracken crafts a far fetched story into a tender reality of heartfelt emotions articulated with envious clarity. Artfully drawn characters and relationships are expressed with fluid intensity that is a pleasure to read and reflect upon.

McCracken bases her giant upon real-life giant Robert Wadlow (RIP 1940), a familiar face in Guinness Books of World Records. Wadlow, who floundered throughout his life seeking a career that would preserve his dignity, was a lot more interesting than her character; not that McCracken's giant is as much a factor in this book as the muted, whiny, navel-contemplating -- in other words, standard dirty-realist --pack of lame supporting characters. McCracken should punt.

Like a few others, I immediately recognized the similarities to Robert Wadlow when I started the book but waited until I was done to look at his Wikipedia page. I haven't read about him since I was a child, so I was appalled at the number of similarities including:
Exact cause of death, height and similar age at the time of death, working for a shoe store and getting free shoes, appearing for the Ringling Brothers, wearing leg braces, being buried in a cement coffin for fear of having his body stolen, fighting a doctor who published very similar negative findings about him, erecting a life-size statue of him after his death, his interest in being a lawyer, the cause of his height, being the tallest man in the world, and very similar measurements at the same ages including being a normal size at birth. Oh and go to thegiantshouse.com and you will not find this book but rather a website about Robert Wadlow's house.
As such, I am extremely disappointed that the only interesting parts of this book were lifted from a real person leaving the original character of Peggy as the most boring person I have ever read about. James was too good for her.

Writing about one's reasons for loving something is such personal experience that I don't normally do it. But I am also aware of that feeling of joy that must be shared.This book is original & is filled with thoughts on love, loneliness & life. At the end of this book I had to choke a cry & was smiling as I read to the end. I hope book lover all around the world will have time of their lives as I have.

The tallest boy in the world, and a convoluted librarian with the biggest heart in the world, this was an enchanting read, complete with loveable oddball characters you'll worry about even long after you turn the last page. This book became an obsession, and is a great flash of lightning on the horizon, for the beauty of McCracken's next novel, "Niagra Falls All Over Again." Deep author, and this book will delve into your heart, deep.

Just when you think there are no more wonderful ways to describe everyday things, along comes Ms. McCracken to surprise and delight us. This is a joy. A moving book even a cynic would love, okay, like.

Really enjoyed the book until the conclusion. Up to the climaxing action, the characters were true to themselves. They did grow and change as the novel went on but in ways that made sense. Then came the last bit, very disappointing. I actually created a different ending in my mind that satisfied me. But, I was still frustrated.

I found this book very interesting in the beginning, and I enjoyed the way the authored wove library references into her story since it the story involved a librarian an her love of books and her job. I found James to be an rather likable character, although I wish he was developed a bit more. Peggy I felt I learned a bit too much about and after a while, for me, she was borderline obsessive on James and I felt he became secondary somewhat to the story to her obsession about him. By the end, Peggy's devotion to James was too much for me and I felt sorry for her character.