Let the great world spin

Colum McCann, 1965-

Book - 2009

A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. 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. A 38-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's allegory comes alive in the voices of the city's p...eople, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the "artistic crime of the century"--a mysterious tightrope walker dancing between the Twin Towers.--From publisher description.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House c2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Colum McCann, 1965- (-)
Edition
1st ed
Item Description
"A novel."
Physical Description
349 p. ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780812973990
9781400063734
Contents unavailable.
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.

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke-stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper. Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky. He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn't want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched. Around the watchers, the city still made its everyday noises. Car horns. Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pothole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street. But the watchers could have taken all the sounds and smashed them down into a single noise and still they wouldn't have heard much at all: even when they cursed, it was done quietly, reverently. They found themselves in small groups together beside the traffic lights on the corner of Church and Dey; gathered under the awning of Sam's barbershop; in the doorway of Charlie's Audio; a tight little theater of men and women against the railings of St. Paul's Chapel; elbowing for space at the windows of the Woolworth Building. Lawyers. Elevator operators. Doctors. Cleaners. Prep chefs. Diamond merchants. Fish sellers. Sad- jeaned whores. All of them reassured by the presence of one another. Stenographers. Traders. Deliveryboys. Sandwichboard men. Cardsharks. Con Ed. Ma Bell. Wall Street. A locksmith in his van on the corner of Dey and Broadway. A bike messenger lounging against a lamppost on West. A red- faced rummy out looking for an early- morning pour. From the Staten Island Ferry they glimpsed him. From the meatpacking warehouses on the West Side. From the new high- rises in Battery Park. From the breakfast carts down on Broadway. From the plaza below. From the towers themselves. Sure, there were some who ignored the fuss, who didn't want to be bothered. It was seven forty- seven in the morning and they were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone. Up they came from the subway stations, from limousines, off city buses, crossing the street at a clip, refusing the prospect of a gawk. Another day, another dolor. But as they passed the little clumps of commotion they began to slow down. Some stopped altogether, shrugged, turned nonchalantly, walked to the corner, bumped up against the watchers, went to the tips of their toes, gazed over the crowd, and then int Excerpted from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.