The story of The Pigman is essentially a tragic one. High school sophomores John Conlan and Lorraine Jensen, through a telephone hoax, meet Mr. Angelo Pignati, an aged widower with a zest for life and a passion for the assortment of model pigs he and his wife have collected. John and Lorraine become friends with Pignati, go to the zoo with him, and drink his homemade wine; theirs is a relationship that begins in sympathy but grows in affection. When Pignati is hospitalized due to a slight heart attack, John and Lorraine use his house to host a party which gets out of control, resulting in serious damage to Pignati's property and the complete destruction of his collection of glass and clay pigs. Pignati returns home at the height of the chaos, finds the devastation more than he can stand, and dies a short time later of a more severe heart attack, leaving John and Lorraine to wonder to what degree, if any, they had played a part in his death.
John and Lorraine alternate as first-person narrators, a technique which affords some insight into Zindel's skillful use of language. John swears; Lorraine does not. Her sentences are longer than his.
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