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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 in a phone interview from Des Moines, where she is vacationing with friends. "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 demeanor 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."
Peggy might have remained unfulfilled were it not for one James Carlson Sweatt, a six foot two 11-year-old on his way to becoming the world's tallest man, who walks into her library one day in 1950. James notices and appreciates Peggy, and a nine-year friendship and unconventional romance is forged over books.
In the hands of McCracken, this unusual, unconsummated love story about a librarian who finds the courage to love is not scandalous, but sweet and inevitable. Perhaps because the relationship caught the author, like Peggy, by surprise. "I hadn't thought that the story was going to be about the two of them," says McCracken, who began the novel while in library science school, which she entered within a year of receiving her MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. "I had always wanted to write a novel about somebody who ran a museum in a house. I really like bad museums. One of my favorite places on earth -- I hope it's still there --is the Houdini Museum in Niagara Falls. And it's just horrible," she says with an affectionate laugh. "It's dusty, and the mannequins are missing hands. And I had originally thought the book was going to be about somebody running the house that the world's tallest man had lived in as a museum. But that didn't happen. Once I started actually writing it became clear to me pretty early on that Peggy was just going to take it away."
Like her short story collection, Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry, the driving force of The Giant's House is character rather than plot. McCracken attributes her fascination with quirky, eccentric characters to an extended family of "wonderfully odd people": her Aunt Blanche who traveled from circus to circus painting clowns, her second cousin who lived to be 97 and gave a tap dancing lesson on the last day of her life. "The most notable thing about my life, in many ways, has been knowing my various relatives," says the author, who, like the self-deprecating Peggy, insists that she has led a perfectly ordinary, uneventful life.
Until last September a librarian at the public library in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she still lives, McCracken shares Peggy's passion for library work. "There's something so wonderful about being paid to be nice and generous to people all day long," she says. "I'm somewhat starry eyed about libraries." She's a little bit worried, however, about what her fellow librarians will think of her book, which plays on the stereotypes of librarians and circumvents them at the same time. "Librarians are fairly touchy about their image," she explains. "The images librarians hate are the librarian looking angry and shushing people, and being kind of stingy and awful. And that certainly is something that just isn't true."
McCracken sees her unconventional heroine's biggest flaws as "emotional caution" and being stingy not with others, but with herself. "She does not think of herself as lovable or even likable a great deal of the time." Peggy repeatedly insists that she's not the extraordinary one, James is. But although James grows to be the tallest man in the world, he is in every other way a fairly ordinary person. "People who are physically different are absolutely usual, emotionally," says the author, who admits she's fascinated by "how people are and are not shaped by who they are physically." Her favorite book as a child was the Guinness Book of World Records. "I was just fascinated by it. There are photographs in the first section, which is on longevity and weight and height and the smallest waist and stuff like that, that are just burned into my brain."
Although recently named one of the 20 best young American novelists by Granta magazine, McCracken isn't letting it go to her head. "It's a very nice honor, but simply having been named to the list does not make me think that I actually am one of the 20 best young novelists. I'm a firm believer that there's writing, and then there's the other half: there's the business of writing -- publication and awards. And they are so separate. Or should be so separate." She says that for her, writing is an often "emotionally affecting and exhausting" process, but one that can also be extraordinarily pleasurable. "There are probably more times than I care to admit when I giggle happily at something I've written and feel overly pleased with myself. To me, that moment when the needle finally finds its groove and you write a passage that you think nails it -- that you're proud of -- that to me is wonderful. I live for those moments."
Laura Reynolds Adler lives in New York City. Her interviews with authors have appeared in several publications.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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