'The Giant's House'
'Kind Hearted Woman'
Elizabeth McCracken; Dial Press; $19.95
Michelle Shocked; Private, Inc.
I
was aware that I didn't mation of a manageable sort,
know anything about love; the kind that can be researched
every morning I realized it within the carefully protected
again. And then I met a tall confines of a library.
boy."
Contact with people is also
The voice of Peggy Cort, a 26- kept within this structured en-
year-old librarian in the small vironment. Her research for
town of Brewsterville, Mass., in them is the same as her re-
1950, is one of two unlikely ro- search of them, and the world
mantic leads in Elizabeth Mc- they inhabit is more of a cu-
Cracken's novel, The Giant's riosity to Peggy than a recog-
House. The other is 11-year-old, nizable, familiar area in which
6-foot-2-inch James Carlson to reside.
Sweatt. The friendship
Peggy recognizes
and love that develop
her distance from oth-
BOOKS
over the years between
ers, without self-pity
them is as ordinary and as
or anger, but there is a
necessary as the far-reaching, longing, particularly when it
all-pertinent information found comes to love: "The rest of the
in books.
world fell in love, and the
The author of a collection of physics baffled me. I could see
short stories, Here's Your Hat it happen ... but I did not un-
What's Your Hurry, The Giant's derstand the emotional gravi-
House is McCracken's first nov- ty that allowed their descent.
el, nominated for this year's Na- And then, like Newton, I felt
tional Book Award. it smack me on the head."
McCracken, herself a former li-
That "smack" arrives with
brarian, creates a beautiful por- James Carlson Sweatt, the "tall
trayal of Peggy, a self-described boy" who enters the library, and
... late bloomer — though I am in turn Peggy's life. Diagnosed
not sure I've bloomed yet ..." with "chronic, congenital
who has resigned herself to a height," there is no end in sight
life based on order and infor- to James' growth. His is the
-
physical equivalent to Peggy's
emotional distance from the
rest of the world. A perfect
match.
Their friendship at first is
based on the acquisition of in-
formation found in books, then
through Peggy's involvement
with James' family, his life, his
future, including the construc-
tion of a cottage specifically de-
signed to meet his physical
requirements. In an effort to
stem James' isolation, Peggy
also decreases her own. She
continues to observe James,
the astounding physical
changes in him that make him
a tourist attraction in Brew-
sterville, with the same care-
ful eye for detail necessary to
her line of work. The difference
is, she grows to love him. "I
loved not only his height, but
his careful way with any hob-
by, his earnestness, his strange
sense of humor that always
surprised me ... I loved him be-
cause I discovered that day, af-
ter years of practice, I had a
talent for it."
The quests of Peggy and
James for information, for un-
derstanding, for connection,
are at the heart of this love
story. Their lives become ad-
ventures as they seek out hu-
man experiences open to the
rest of the world, once consid-
ered closed to them. As Peggy
says, "Nowadays, trendy li-
brarians, wanting to be im-
portant, say, 'Knowledge is
power.' I know better. Knowl-
edge is love."
THE DETROIT J EWI SH NEWS
— Tracy Karbel
Tracy Karbel loves to read and
indulges that pleasure by
working at Book Beat
bookstore, as well as for
IISHJ, the International
Institute for Secular
Humanistic Judaism.
She is a Sagittarius.
Bagel Barometer
Outstanding
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F
or the uninitiated, Michelle heard about her career — she
Shocked's latest recording, left home at a young age and
Kind Hearted Woman, is a lived among hobos — Shocked
great introduction to an is here to tell us, "I always be-
American original, a singer- lieve I ran away, but now I know
songwriter who stakes out her I was told to go."
territory with the ease of a vir-
The song, which has also re-
tuoso.
ceived the most airplay of any
For Shocked, a consummate on "Kind Hearted Woman," is
storyteller, it's the emotional and the epiphany of a survivor, but
physical vastness of the Texan it is still laced with Shocked's
landscape that evokes her well-developed sense of irony.
amusement, her disdain and her
"Stillborn," the song about a
longing. The songs on
stillbirth, is less personal
Kind Hearted Woman
but sung with a feverish-
address everything
CDs
ness that stops the lis-
from a stillbirth, told
tener dead. Shocked's
from the perspective of the mid- minimal guitar and her plain-
wife, to the harvesting of a tive voice is hard to listen to but
wheat crop in the face of a cruel' harder to turn away from.
winter to a pyromaniac kid
Shocked has always been
named Eddie.
wedged into the category of folk
Shocked swings from bitter- singer, and certainly her subjects
sweet to sassy as she fleshes out are classically folksy, but this
the lives of her characters, in- recording shows she is way be-
cluding a 35-year-old widow who yond quaint or old-fashioned. An
must count on itinerant workers instant classic.
to tend her fields and a woman
whose father has been convict-
ed of a killing.
0(1) Zit.
"The Hard Way," the song in
which Shocked comes closest to
speaking of herself, is a reflec-
— Julie Edgar
tion on the mistakes she made
in her youth, including a correc- Julie Edgar,
senior writer, loves
tion of the self-image she culti- music that speaks
from the
vated. For anyone who has mind and heart.