In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
This book, I admit, confused me. It was written well, and had great imagery, language characters/development, but it was written in such a way that you could get confused easily. Each chapter of the book is a different person's story and how they intersect with the other characters and the tightrope walker (although personally I thought each person's story could have been made into a book of their own they were so interesting, and interconnecting them through the tightrope walker sometimes was a bit of a stretch). All of this jumping around not only between characters, but also in time and story lines (you can be told part of a story by one character in chapter two and have it begun by someone in chapter eight, and finished in chapter seven.) causes confusion to the reader but does not make it any less powerful of a story about the way peoples lives intersect in strange and amazing ways. I enjoyed this book, inspide of being confused sometimes while reading it.
Let the Great World Spin is a novel structured as a series of mostly interesting short stories each focusing on different characters. Some of the stories overlap a great deal and some are more tangential. I enjoy short stories so I like this organizational concept as well as the overlaid theme of the tightrope walker that binds them all together.
However, a short story is a very concentrated and demanding form and is not at all forgiving of errors. The stories vary in tone, style, narrative mode, and use of language to reflect the different personalities. This makes an interesting mosaic but the quality also varies greatly so there are some stories here that succeed and some that fail. Sometimes the author even caricatures and stereotypes people and places.
The quality of the writing itself is inconsistent even within chapters. The author is obviously very skilled at choosing words and constructing interesting phrases and sentences. However, there are entire sections of chapters where the words or thoughts expressed by the characters are very unnatural or inappropriate and the reader is distracted by the clumsiness. Similarly, the author is quite capable of setting a scene and describing details effectively yet sometimes utterly fails to convince. I was surprised to learn that the author actually lives in New York City, which is the setting for most of the novel.
While the overall framework works well, there are structural problems on a smaller scale. There are bursts of sentence fragments and while they are effective in small doses, when extended or frequently repeated, they become tedious. One chapter has similar staccato bursts amplified into disjointed paragraphs and they fail in telling what is an interesting story. There are other distracting stylistic choices such as different ways of formatting dialogue, sometimes with quotes and sometimes with dashes. Sometimes the effect is of a rough draft or outline of a story rather than of a finished work.
In the end, I felt shortchanged by the author's failure to consistently live up to great potential. These are interesting stories not always told well. The failures are due to trying too hard rather than not trying hard enough and I expect that as this author matures and learns to relax a little instead of overworking the prose that his writing will be more reliable and enjoyable.
LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN is a novel of New York City, told via ten short stories that are linked through shared characters and a connection to Philippe Petit's 1974 real-life tightrope walk between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
The novel's structure requires the reader to invest in a story and its characters and then seemingly begin anew with the next story. Yet soon the stories begin to interconnect, and the possibility of encountering early, beloved characters in subsequent stories -- from different perspectives and with new and satisfying revelations -- creates a strong narrative pull. McCann's fine writing develops tension, too: one story recounts Petit's wire-walk exclusively through dialogue (a phone conversation); though I knew the history and thus the outcome, still the storytelling was riveting.
These are some of the most substantial characters and stories I've encountered; I ache to revisit them, including NYC itself. Though McCann never mentions 9/11, he evokes it obliquely in passages set in 2006 -- my favorite is a now-perfect metaphor, one that didn't exist before that day: "She had the bluest eyes, they looked like small drops of September sky." Highly recommended.
(Also recommended as a companion: the 2008 Oscar-winning documentary film, "Man on Wire.")
