The Giant's House: A Romance (P.S.) (Paperback)

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.