On Reading Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House 3-17-2013 (Part One)

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. The original is 4 handwritten pages, so it seems best to split the original in two parts. sch 8/16/2025] 

I spent the past week tired and working on other things than these notes. I finished reading Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant’s House the week before last. I also read The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and began reading The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware before I took time for writing.

I never hear of The Giant’s House, nor its author. The book came out in 1996, the year T2 decided to head off to New Albany and I met CC, when any vitality in my law firm came to an end. I had little interest in literature.

I like cranky, apparently misanthropic characters. McCracken begins with:

I do not love mankind.

People think they're interesting. That's their first mistake. Every retiree you meet wants to supply you with their life story.

 The narrator proceeds to tell her life story; which ends like this:

I am a figure they imagine knocking on their doors, to test them. They don't know what they should do to pass the test: let me in to sit by their radiator, or send me down the sidewalk to bewitch another house. They anticipate me at any moment, thrilled with the possibilities.

Between opening and closing paragraphs, an eccentric woman collides with an eccentric man (or two). I recalled The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, read back at Ball State University, before the end of the Seventies. It also made me think of the more recently read The Solitude of Prime Numbers. I think Carson McCullers may have begun a new genre: love among the psychologically damaged.  And which one of us is not psychologically damaged to some degree?

sch

[8/16/2025: I found the following while seeking out links for my original text, which I found most interesting:

A Review of Paolo Giordano’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers (by Bethany) (Postcards From Purgatory - this blog looks very interesting.)

The Arrested Development of Carson McCullers (The New Yorker). McCullers seems to be slipping from the literary conversation; she was an eccentric, but her eccentricity might be more understandable today.

sch.]