The Giant's House

I was looking at some diary entries of mine from way back in the day. I can't be sure but I think I wrote this back in first year college, so I was about sixteen. I wanted to post this here because, years later, The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken is still one of my favorite books. (I hope my few but dedicated readers pay no attention to my ramblings about Nietzche and Sartre; I was barely out of high school and it was cool, back then, to talk about existentialism and nihilism.)

1.49am. When I was in high school, I used to write book reviews for the paper. The writing club moderator usually murdered the articles that I wrote (particularly this one editorial I wrote, “A Whiff of Grapeshot”. It was published—unbelievably, incredibly, ridiculously—with the title “A Whiff of a Grapeshot”.), but most of the time my book reviews survived the clumsy editing unscathed. Every time I would pick up a book in high school I would ask myself if I could possibly write a review for it; if it were an average book then I would have no interest in publishing a review, since my purpose in writing those reviews was to actually get people to read what I thought of as “sensible” reading material, rather than to accomplish any great feats in literary critique.

Even now as I pick up a book I ask myself the same question. I now wish I could write a review for “The Giant’s House” by Elizabeth McCracken. Today, after our trip to the airport and as my mother went grocery shopping, I bundled off to the local used book shop. (What a find--today I discovered a copy of Monstrous Regiment of Women, which I would have bought for the pure irony of finding a Laurie R. King in a booksale if I had more money.) In the (poorly-organized) stacks I usually find abandoned Agatha Christies and PD Jameses, which I buy and hardly ever read (not that I don’t intend to), as well as anthologies of philosophers’ works. I owe that booksale my Nietzche reader, and today, a surprising find--Sartre's No Exit and Other Plays. Today I also found The Sound and the Fury and an anthology of plays by Bertolt Brecht. All three purchases amounted to 150php; being stingy with money nowadays I recognized this as an extravagant amount, but I couldn’t let myself part with these books because of the possibility that they might not be there when I return. I am already kicking myself for abandoning that battered copy of (one of the translations of one of the versions of) the tragedy of Tristan and Iseult that I saw last week and never saw again.

As the cashier was rounding up my purchases I perused the titles on the shelf behind her, and lo and behold, I found not one but two, hardly-damaged copies of Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House.

One of my most cherished possessions is my List. It’s the list that I carry around in my head (and in my hard drive) of all the books that I want to read--no, actually, to purchase, since just reading books from the library makes me feel as though I am touching a promiscuous thing, a package not married to a purchaser, an infidel book. I like books that are my own, whether used or not. And while I do buy books on impulse I keep a list in my head. The list, one might be surprised to know, is actually rather short--mostly taken up by boring treatises on Sherlock Holmes and Hawking/Penrose physics and all the titles I don’t already have by Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, Terry Pratchett, Nick Joaquin and PD James. Sometimes I see random quotations from books and I feel compelled to include the books in the List. The Giant’s House is one of those books; years ago I read a summary of it, and a brief quotation: “I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my whole life, who says, I know, me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?” After reading that almost-trite-but-not-quite excerpt and the brief summary I was convinced that at some point in my life I had to read this, this incredibly unlikely and promisingly bittersweet pseudo-romance (But I do feel like a traitor, using that description of “pseudo” when I’ve just finished reading it) between a misanthropic librarian and the tallest boy (man? How does one know the difference, really?) in the world.

My mother humoured me and bought the book, despite the fact that it cost 110php (terribly extravagant for a booksale purchase). I wasn’t disappointed. In the past year I’ve given up on what people now commonly call “novels”; mostly I’ve been reading a lot of farce (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Wodehouse even), a lot of chemistry with some physics on the side, even an encyclical from the Pope, but I found that I’d grown tired of the sentimental claptrap that seems to permeate even the most respected contemporary novels. I’m tired of the blurbs “compelling” and “powerful” and “tour de force” (this last because it hardly ever is true). So I did feel some trepidation upon picking up GIANT. Now, however, I am surprised and happy to report that Elizabeth McCracken has restored my faith in the contemporary novelist. It’s not a perfect book, but it comes close, it comes close. It’s incredible--in the way that Sylvia Plath made insanity seem almost an everyday experience, something a reader could walk through as though it were as simple and accessible as going to the movies or eating or breathing, Elizabeth McCracken makes the experience of loving a child, a giant, a freak, something more than believable, far more than accessible.

And the flow--how to describe the flow? The writing itself is so fluid, the transitions so very easy, that the reader feels the years bleed into one another, into one a tapestry of feeling and experience. I couldn’t put it down, and this I mean almost literally. I needed to let go of it for the few hours it took to get to church, hear evening mass then come home. But other than that, no separation. This morning at ten am I finished (finally; I’ve been putting it off for days) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I thought one book a day would be enough—but then eight or so hours after buying GIANT I finished that as well.

I can’t describe it enough. I know most people wouldn’t feel as passionately for the book as I do, but it’s like I know this rather than believe it. There’s a part of me for whom the idea of anyone not completely relating to misanthropic, pathetic, unhappy, facetious Peggy is inconceivable.

(Taken out of context, the quotations in this entry seem almost trite. But… oh well, there is nothing I can really say to convince the reader that they’re not. The reader would have to meet James--eight-foot-four, kind, dying James--for themselves, to be convinced of that. )

“Every day my heart was broken newly, more efficiently.”
2.24am