Review by New York Times Review
In Colum McCann's New York novel, everything 'is built upon another thing.' PHILIPPE PETIT, the French acrobat who in 1974 walked across a tightrope between the twin towers, wasn't on the payroll of the Port Authority, but in retrospect he probably should have been. At the time, the newly opened World Trade Center was shaping up as a huge mistake. Not only had the project cost far more than it was supposed to, but a city spiraling toward bankruptcy didn't exactly need millions more square feet of office space. Worse still, the towers were out of scale and utterly unattractive "the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world," as one critic put it. They were the ugly stepchild of New York's skyscrapers, seemingly destined to be forever denied a place in the life and lore of the city. But in the span of a single summer morning, Petit gave the towers a history of their own. His stunt represented nothing less than a symbolic passing of the torch: in the remake of "King Kong" two years later, the furious, lovelorn gorilla takes his last stand not astride the Empire State Building but atop the World Trade Center. For all the hoopla that greeted Petit's walk, it was largely forgotten until 9/11, when it was rediscovered amid the sudden nostalgia for all things twin towers. There was Petit's own memoir about the walk, "To Reach the Clouds," as well as a memorable New Yorker cover on the fifth anniversary of the attacks and an Oscarwinning documentary, "Man on Wire." Now Colum McCann has repurposed Petit's daring act as the leitmotif for "Let the Great World Spin," one of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years. McCann makes little effort to hew to the facts of Petit's story; he doesn't even name the wire walker. But the author appears to have remained faithful to the stunt's larger truths. Like Petit, McCann's acrobat doesn't simply focus on safely crossing 210 feet of braided cable, 110 stories up; he dances joyously among the clouds, reveling in his fleeting moment of human transcendence: "He was pureness moving. . . . He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air." I don't want to overstate Petit's role in this book. The walk is really little more than a cultural touchstone and a literary conceit, the event around which McCann has assembled his cast. But the metaphorical possibilities of the walker - the paradox of this innocent, unsanctioned act of "divine delight" being carried out between two buildings that would one day be so viciously and murderously destroyed - are hard to ignore, particularly in a novel so concerned with the twin themes of love and loss. "Let the Great World Spin" will sneak up on you. It begins slowly and quietly on the other side of the ocean. There, in a seaside town in Ireland (McCann was born in Dublin but now lives in New York), we are introduced to two of its central characters, a budding monk named Corrigan and his aimless brother, Ciaran. They soon find their way to a bleak project in the 1970s South Bronx ("Kids on the 10th floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below"), where Corrigan informally ministers to the prostitutes who peddle their wares beneath the Major Deegan Expressway while Ciaran tends bar at an Irish pub in Queens and tries to make sense of the strange life that his ascetic brother has chosen. From here, the book's sweep gradually expands as the brothers' story collides with those of several others, among them an aging black hooker, a Guatemalan nurse and a 20-something artist. The circle continues to widen, six-degrees-ofseparation-style, with the players growing ever more diverse. The film "Crash" inevitably comes to mind - there's even a fatal car accident - only without the reductive moralizing. "It had never occurred to me before," one character says, "but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected." Like a great pitcher in his prime, McCann is constantly changing speeds, adopting different voices, tones and narrative styles as he shifts between story lines. Inevitably, some of his portraits work better than others. That prostitute, boldly rendered in the first person, feels disappointingly clichéd from a writer of such imaginative gifts. Far more original and nuanced are a Park Avenue housewife and her husband, the judge Solomon Soderberg, who are trying in different ways to cope with the death of their son. It is a mark of the novel's soaring and largely fulfilled ambition that McCann just keeps rolling out new people, deftly linking each to the next, as his story moves toward its surprising and deeply affecting conclusion. In a loose sense, what connects everyone in this novel is the high-wire walker; the day of his stunt is a pivotal one in all of their lives. But they are bound more powerfully by something else: grief. "Let the Great World Spin" is an emotional tour de force. It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one. Through their anguish, McCann's characters manage to find comfort, even a kind of redemption. ALWAYS in the background is a time and a place - the waning days of Nixon and Vietnam, and New York in the 1970s. McCann gives us snapshots of the decaying city, slipping in occasional references to cultural landmarks like Max's Kansas City and Studio 54 (which didn't actually open until 1977, McCann might like to know for the paperback edition). But he also finds other vantage points from which to gaze at the heaving muck of New York, most memorably Manhattan's municipal courthouse. "He watched the parade come in and out," McCann writes of the judge's job processing criminals, "and he wondered how the city had become such a disgusting thing on his watch. . . . It was like surveying the evolution of slime. You stand there long enough and the gutter gets slick, no matter how hard you battle against it." Here and elsewhere, "Let the Great World Spin" can feel like a precursor to another novel of colliding cultures: "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe's classic portrait of New York in the 1980s. But McCann's effort is less disciplined, more earnest, looser, rougher, more flawed but also more soulful - in other words, more like the city itself. In recent years, we've seen the emergence of a new generation of New York novelists led by Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead, both native New Yorkers. McCann brings an immigrant's refreshing sense of awe to the same terrain. "Every now and then the city shook its soul out," he writes. "It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief." Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning" and "The Challenge," which is just out in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After the rigors of Zoli (2007), his historical tale of Romani life, best-selling literary novelist McCann allows himself more artistic freedom in his shimmering, shattering fifth novel. It begins on August 7, 1974, when New Yorkers are stopped in their tracks by the sight of a man walking between the towers of the World Trade Center. Yes, it's Philippe Petit, the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Man on Wire and one of McCann's many intense and valiant characters. The cast also includes two Irish brothers: Corrigan, a radical monk, and Ciaran, who follows him to the blasted Bronx, where he encounters resilient prostitute Tillie and her spirited daughter Jazzlyn. Gloria lives in the same housing project, and she befriends Claire of Park Avenue as they mourn the deaths of their sons in Vietnam. McCann's hallucinatory descriptions of a great city tattooed and besmirched with graffiti, blood, and drugs in the midst of a financial freefall are eerie in their edgy beauty, chilling reminders of how quickly civilization unravels. Here, too, are portals onto war, the justice system, and the dawning of the cyber age. In McCann's wise and elegiac novel of origins and consequences, each of his finely drawn, unexpectedly connected characters balances above an abyss, evincing great courage with every step.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McCann's sweeping new novel hinges on Philippe Petit's illicit 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers. It is the aftermath, in which Petit appears in the courtroom of Judge Solomon Soderberg, that sets events into motion. Solomon, anxious to get to Petit, quickly dispenses with a petty larceny involving mother/daughter hookers Tillie and Jazzlyn Henderson. Jazzlyn is let go, but is killed on the way home in a traffic accident. Also killed is John Corrigan, a priest who was giving her a ride. The other driver, an artist named Blaine, drives away, and the next day his wife, Lara, feeling guilty, tries to check on the victims, leading her to meet John's brother, with whom she'll form an enduring bond. Meanwhile, Solomon's wife, Claire, meets with a group of mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam. One of them, Gloria, lives in the same building where John lived, which is how Claire, taking Gloria home, witnesses a small salvation. McCann's dogged, DeLillo-like ambition to show American magic and dread sometimes comes unfocused-John Corrigan in particular never seems real-but he succeeds in giving us a high-wire performance of style and heart. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The famous 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers is a central motif in this unwieldy paean to the adopted city of Dublin-born McCann (Zoli, 2007, etc.). Told by a succession of narrators representing diverse social strata, the novel recalls Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), except that where Bonfire was deeply cynical about Reagan-era New York, McCann's take on the grittier, 1970s city is deadly earnest. On the day that "the tightrope walker" (never named, but obviously modeled on Philippe Petit) strolls between the Twin Towers, other New Yorkers are performing quieter acts of courage. Ciaran has come from Dublin to the Bronx to rescue his brother Corrigan, a monk whose ministry involves providing shelter and respite to an impromptu congregation of freeway underpass hookers. Corrigan chastely yearns for Adelita, his co-worker at a nursing home. Claire, heiress wife of Solomon, a judge at the "Shithouse" (Manhattan criminal court), has joined a support group of bereaved mothers whose sons died in the Vietnam War. With much trepidation, she hosts the groupincluding Gloria, Corrigan's neighbor and the only African-American memberat her Park Avenue penthouse. Two of Corrigan's prostitute flock, Jazzlyn and her mother Tillie, are picked up on an outstanding warrant, and he accompanies them to their arraignment in Solomon's courtroom, where the newly arrested sky-walker is among those waiting to plead. Cocaine-addled painters Blaine and Lara, once again fleeing the Manhattan art scene, also flee the accident scene after their classic car clips Corrigan's van from the rear as he's driving Jazzlyn home. (Tillie, having taken the rap for her daughter, is in jail.) Peripheral characters command occasional chapters as well, and this series of linked stories never really gels as a novel. Unfocused and overlong, though written with verve, empathy and stylistic mastery. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
