McCracken, Elizabeth: *1966

The Giant's House, 1996 - Thematic Parallels: Unconventional Love

McCracken, Elizabeth: The Giant's House, 1996
The novel is an unconventional love story centered on themes of belonging, acceptance, and the search for human connection in the face of social isolation and physical difference.
The following books are thematically simliar. Having read "The Giant's House," the following texts lend themselves well to being read in groups, compared with one another, or used to teach a similar topic over an extended period with a class:
- Lawrence, D.H.: The Virgin and the Gypsy, 1930, ~90pp
  The novella focuses on forbidden love, outsider status, and the constraints of social expectations.
  Both works explore themes of unconventional love, emotional repression, and social boundaries. Lawrence ends with a natural disaster — a flood — which metaphorically and literally washes away repression, forcing an shock in Yvette. There’s a cleansing, positive quality to the ending, though it's ambiguous. McCracken’s novel is steeped in melancholy. James’s fate is known from the beginning — he will die young. The tragic trajectory is not a sudden disruption but a slow, inevitable unfolding.
- McCullers, Carson: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, 1951, ~90pp
  The novella explores loneliness, unconventional love, and relationships between outsiders in a small town.
  Both works are about loneliness, unconventional love, and emotional isolation, explored through characters who are outsiders in their own communities. Both works resist easy sentimentality, instead offering meditations on how love and loneliness shape the human condition, often through bodies and relationships that the world doesn’t quite know how to accept.
- Proulx, Annie: Brokeback Mountain, 1997, ~35pp
  The novel examines a secret, unconventional relationship and the pain of being an outsider in society.
  Both works suggest love can flourish in impossible circumstances, but also that society and fate often render such love tragic. While "Brokeback Mountain" is stark and masculine, and "The Giant’s House" is quirky and feminine, both are meditations on lonely love, emotional exile, and the strange endurance of longing. They refuse easy moral judgments and instead offer deeply felt, quietly devastating portraits of characters who love beyond what the world will allow.
- Strout, Elizabeth: Amy and Isabelle, 1998, ~300pp
  This novel examines the complex relationship between a mother and daughter in a small town, focusing on themes of loneliness, longing, and the desire for acceptance—much like Peggy and James in The Giant’s House.
  Both novels center on women navigating emotional isolation, longing, and unconventional love. Though Strout’s work is more restrained and McCracken’s more impulsive, both offer portraits of women yearning for connection in worlds that misunderstand or marginalize them.
List of general discussion questions on Unconventional Love (pdf)
List of essay prompts on Unconventional Love (pdf)