This month, the Debs are looking at literary couples. Cheryl Walsh, author of Unequal Temperament (forthcoming from American Buffalo Books), joins us today to talk about a literary couple that captured her heart and never let it go.
This Will Never Work
When it comes to literary couples, my tastes run to the star-crossed–lovers variety, though not to Romeo and Juliet. They are far too young and impulsive to hold my attention long, much less my sympathy. Cyrano and Roxane are more up my street. I prefer the slow burn of long acquaintance that allows time for friendship to take deep root, to sprout and mature over many seasons, and maybe, against all odds, allows for love to blossom. Though even as our couple gets their first whiff of love’s intoxicating perfume, we all know their relationship is doomed. This will never, ever, work.
Much as I love Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in the contest for my affections, Cyrano and Roxane met their match in Peggy Cort and James Sweatt, the decidedly star-crossed lovers of Elizabeth McCracken’s novel, The Giant’s House: A Romance. When they meet, Peggy is 25, a librarian who doesn’t care for people and who is convinced people would never care for an odd duck like her. And James is a six-foot-two 11-year-old who will grow up (and up and up) to be the tallest man in the world.
James’s congenital condition will eventually be fatal—continuing to grow beyond all human proportion wreaks havoc in all his body’s systems. He won’t live long into adulthood, if he makes it that far. Peggy likes him as soon as she meets him and in time becomes his most devoted friend and confidant. He appreciates her quick wit, her honesty, and her refusal to suffer either fools or self-pity. She admires his intelligence, his curiosity, and perhaps more than anything else, his poignant longing to find a place in the world that has, literally and figuratively, no space for him.
As James progresses through adolescence, daily life becomes ever more cumbersome, and everything he reads and hears from doctors tells him he has no future. Yet he longs for the future as any teenager does, and Peggy is right there with his family, trying to figure out a way for him to enjoy the present so that he can arrive optimistic at another day and eventually reach some unforeseen destiny. As Peggy becomes aware that she has fallen in love with him, she learns that, even if James returned her feelings, even if he could somehow survive into adulthood, his condition would make it impossible for them to consummate their love. Or would it, really? And would it even matter, if they had each other and could see a road ahead?
The Giant’s House, in spite of its strong streak of melancholy, is full of whip-smart dialogue and humor. It is moreover a beautiful meditation on loneliness and love, in which each is brought into relief by the other. For readers like me with a taste for the bittersweet, the doomed love of Peggy and James is irresistible.
Cheryl Walsh