LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN

Colum McCann

MSRP $15, 400 Pages.

Published by Random House.

Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers is pivotal to the lives in this novel, a winner of the 2009 National Book Award.

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later. You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal. And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful.

But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants." --Mari Malcolm

Amazon Exclusive: Frank McCourt on Let the Great World Spin

Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and returned to America in 1949. For thirty years he taught in New York City high schools. His first book, Angela's Ashes, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Field of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education. McCourt also wrote Tis and Teacher Man, both memoirs. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Let the Great World Spin:

Now I worry about Colum McCann. What is he going to do after this blockbuster groundbreaking heartbreaking symphony of a novel? No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived deeper.

Trust me, this is the sort of book that you will take off your shelf over and over again as the years go along. It’s a story of the early 1970s, but it’s also the story of our present times. And it is, in many ways, a story of a moment of lasting redemption even in the face of all the evidence.

There are dozens of intimate tales and threads at the core of Let the Great World Spin. On one level there’s the tightrope walker making his way across the World Trade Center towers. But as the novel goes along the “walker” becomes less and less of a focal point and we begin to care more about the people down below, on the pavement, in the ordinary throes of their existence. There’s an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects. There’s a Park Avenue mother in mourning for her dead son, who was blown up in the cafés of Saigon. There are the original computer hackers who "visit" New York in an early echo of the Internet. There’s an artist who has learn to return to the simplicity of love. And then--in possibly the book’s wildest and most ambitious section--there’s a Bronx hooker who has brought up her children in “the house that horse built”--“horse” of course being the heroin that was ubiquitous in the '70s.

All the voices feel realized and authentic and the writing floats along. This was my city back then--and now. McCann has written about New York before, but never quite as piercingly or as provocatively as this. This is fiction that gets the heart thumping.

The stories are interweaved so that it is one story, on one day, in one city, and yet it is also a history of the present time. In Let the Great World Spin, you can’t ignore the overtones for today: suffice it to say that the novel is held together by an act of redemption and beauty. I didn’t want to stop turning the pages.

I’m really not sure what McCann will do after this, but this is a great New York book, not just for New Yorkers but for anyone who walks any sort of tightrope at all. And yes, it doesn’t surprise me that it takes an Irishman to capture the heart of the city... --Frank McCourt

(Photo © Kit DeFever)

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Articles from the New York Times

First Chapter

Sunday Review

Related Article

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Customer Reviews

A Very Long Time to Say Nothing

Rating

"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann is a series of well written short stories, which ultimately get intertwined. These fictional stories happen around the cultural touchstone of Philippe Petit stringing a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center and walking the distance, to the amazement of the people below.

The book begins slowly as we are introduced to two Irish brothers on the other side of the Atlantic; Corrigan, a soon to be monk, and his brother Ciaran who has no goals or aspirations. The brothers find themselves in The Bronx where Corrigan takes several prostitutes under his care, brings them coffee and allows them to use his bathroom between tricks. The story expands as the brothers' story crosses aging prostitutes, as South American nurse, a Park Avenue housewife, a budding artist who left her rich Southern family to create art up north and several others.

The news that Petit walked between the two towers have eclipsed that of the Nixon resignation and the Vietnam War - even though both are lurking in the background and raising their ugly heads every now and then. McCann uses the tightrope stunt as a way to tie all the separate stories to a memorable day, Petit is not even mentioned by name in the novel. The problem is that it all seems forced, as if the author had a bunch of short stories laying around and added some a few paragraphs to tie them all in a neat package to be bounded up and put on the shelf.

McCann uses different voices, styles and speeds while shifting between the stories. Some work better than others as new people keep appearing, each one inevitably linked to the past and the future. That makes a strange mosaic of not only storytelling, but also quality of the writing as some stories are much better than others. Don't get me wrong, there are some brilliant passages in this book, but they get bogged them.

I forced myself to finish the book, I wanted to find out what was so great about this book that it made the "best of..." list every time. What I discovered was an interesting story, sometimes frustrating, which often seemed more like a rough draft than the finished masterpiece it was promised to be simply because the stories aren't told to the reader, they are being explained.
"Let The Great World Spin" is not horribly bad, but not really great either. The stories are amusing but, like the high wire act which they all reference, half are good and the others splash on the pavement. The author is very capable of beautiful prose; however he takes a very long time to say nothing.

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Just could not get into it

Rating

Perhaps this book is more for people that enjoy "literature" rather than reading for pleasure. I'm also studying another language, so I guess at this point I just want to read a book for the entertainment value. This is not it for me. I made it through the first story which I found inordinately depressing and then quit. Most people seem to think that it was brilliant, so it's probably just a matter of me not being able to appreciate "literature".

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The writing is exquisite but I am not as WOW'd as I expected to be.

Rating

I have a lot of friends who read and suggest books to me. This book was suggested by a number of people and reviewed glowingly here on Amazon and on other websites. It sat on my shelf for a long while but I finally read it and finished it recently.

McCann takes a real-life event--Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers (World Trade Center) in New York--and then weaves a number of different tales about people who saw the walk or crossed paths with the walker (or each other) in some way. The characters are in the book are from different age groups, races and economic levels, even different countries--a support group of mothers who who have lost sons in the war, a group of hookers and the Irish monk who lives among them and tries to save them from themselves, and the judge who hears the case of the tightrope walker (since he did the walk on the sly, without any permission from the city, it was considered public endangerment at the very least). Family relationships are often at the core of the stories--the Irish monk and his brother, mother and daughter hookers, mothers who lost sons in the war, and one of the mothers in the support group is the wife of the judge who heard the walker's case. Like Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, McCann takes seemingly unrelated people and knits their stories together, sometimes having them show up in the same place in the same time (such as the mother & daughter hookers who happened to be in the same courtroom when the walker's case was presented).

Unfortunately, I am not a person who sits down and reads for hours at a time and finishes a book in a few days. I read perhaps 15-30 minutes each night at bedtime, and always have at least 2 books going at the same time, so it takes me a good while to finish each book. Also unfortunately, this is the kind of book that suffers from a long read. I think I would have liked it much more if I had read the entire book in 3 or 4 days. As it was, it felt a little fractured to me...like I was reading a book of short stories instead of a single cohesive story with multiple characters.

That is the only reason I'm giving the book 4 stars vs. 5, because there is no doubt that the writing is good. The writing is, in fact, exquisite. This, too, slowed down my reading, because I'd hit a passage that just sang out to me and I'd have to stop and let it roll around in my brain a few times, like savoring a fine wine or an expensive piece of chocolate. As an amateur writer myself, finding passages like that is part of the wonderful gift of reading, and I don't like to rush past them.

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Still Spinning...

Rating

Now and then, and not so very often, a writer is more of a magician. Perhaps even a medium, channeling other voices, the medium between the reader and the world he creates before our very eyes--out of nothing, a great something. Such is Colum McCann. It wasn't long before I was reading this book with reverence, with realization that I was holding in my hands a work of art.

The opening of the novel is a view of the sky, a mile and some up into the sky, where a tiny dot sways gracefully on a thin wire, strung between those two well-known towers, now gone. Our eyes are drawn upward, as if we, too, stand there, on the New York City pavement, heads thrown back. This tightrope walker is a true event from 1974, and McCann has built his fictional world around him, below him, to catch him and that moment of impossible grace. From high in the air, the author brings our gaze down, down, to the very depths and darkest corners of this famous and infamous city.

We see pieces and shards of lives, seemingly disconnected, until by book's end we see--all things, all lives are connected, as if a by a thin wire. We step into the lives of an Irish priest, of a street corner peopled by hookers sharing heroin needles, of broken-hearted mothers with sons lost to war, of a Park Avenue judge with frustrated ambitions, and of colorful artists. These are not whole lives, nor whole images, but pieces, just the same way we glimpse the lives of those around us every day. As if we know them, yet we know no one, not really, not even ourselves. Yet their experiences are powerful in the way that our everyday lives are--living, dying, struggling with dilemmas, evaluating our values, getting by.

McCann's writing can be dense, but it is never out of tune. Never. Draw a finger along with each line, read it aloud, and you will never find one word out of place. He writes like life is lived, without pretension. He writes the way we think. Choppy sometimes, long and drawn out sometimes, disjointed sometimes, coming together again sometimes. His intuition of perfect rhythm is breathtaking. His ability to speak as others, as anyone else, is perhaps the most masterful I have seen in literature in many years, and perhaps even more, perhaps a lifetime of reading. I am dumbfounded by his ability to write cross-gender, a man who somehow is able to fit himself inside a woman, and not just any woman, but an African-American middle-aged grandmother who is a hooker, and the fit is... there's that word again... perfect. He has it. He has her voice. I forget him entirely when I read her, he is gone, she is all that is there, and she fills the room in our minds with her vivid and vibrant presence. He gets it, how she feels under her hundredth man of the day, and the next moment how she thinks of her daughter, her grandchild, and fights for her family. What author can possibly accomplish this? Colum McCann.

"The men were just bodies moving on me. Bits of color. They didn't matter none. Sometimes I just felt like a needle in a jukebox. I just fell on that groove and rode in awhile. Then I'd pick the dust off and drop again." (page 206)

She is an astounding character, embodying the shining best of a woman and the darkest and deepest kind of shadow. There is no judgment made about her, no lecture given, only a person presented, real and gritty and so close to you that you can see the blood pulsing in her temple and smell the sweat on her skin. Real. You can't just walk by her.

Another scene that stunned me with its mastery was one of a car accident, a moment in time captured as if outside of time. The author knows how time spins out in such a scene, and how our minds slow and speed again, replay the moment from a thousand different angles, spinning and spinning in a dizzying circle until all the colors blur together.

"The van spun farther. It was almost front-on. On the passenger side, all I could see was a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard. Untangling in slow motion. The bottoms of her feet were so white at the edges and so dark in their hollows that they could only have belonged to a black woman. She untucked at the ankles. The spin was slow enough. I could just see the top of her frame. She was calm. As if ready to accept. Her hair was pulled back tight off her face and bright baubles of jewelry bounced at her neck. If I hadn't seen her again, moments later, after she was thrown through the windshield, I might have thought she was naked, given the angle I was looking from. Younger than me, a beauty. Her eyes traveled across mine ... She was gone just as quickly. The van went into a wider spin and our car kept going straight.... The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of a grille ..." (page 116-117)

On and on it goes, that slow unweaving description, spinning us into its vortex, until the image of the spinning van and the woman flying through the windshield becomes a permanent burn on the brain.

McCann does it again when he describes how the trapeze artist practices for his masterpiece of a moment, walking the cable strung between the two towers. One would think the author once again peeled away his own skin, unzipped that of the high wire artist, and stepped inside. Not one detail is missed.

This is a novel that is nothing short of a ballet of words. Changing rhythms, changing lighting, never losing a step or missing a breath. McCann won the National Book Award for this book, but I would hold out for even higher awards. I am still trying to remember how to breathe as I come out of the spin, slowly, of his literary magic.

Colum McCann is the author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in 30 languages. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.


~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet

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So much promise, so little delivery

Rating

My book club's selection, "Let the Great World Spin", promised to live up to its reviews and awards. I found it a muddle of language with long paragraphs of description (one paragraph that took up half a page consisted entirely of phrases that began "Death by....") Some of the characters were appealing, others shallow in both their development and world view. They all seemed to be haunted by voices from the past--the Park Avenue matron whose grief over her only son's death was poignant but bogged down in detail--petunias, bagels, ashtrays, mezuzzahs, cigarettes). (This writer should take a page from Hemingway and McCarthy and go for the pithy but succinct simple sentence.)

The writer's idiosyncratic use of punctuation and sentence structure seemed, after a point, just laziness. The book didn't hold my attention for more than 10 minutes at a time. After ten minutes, I put it down, annoyed with the lack of continuity and inadequate character development.

I've never been enamored of the glamor and grittiness of New York City. I'm even less impressed now. McCann seems better at describing Dublin where we get a definite sense of place and culture. Lately, I've been 0 for 4 when it comes to new writers. I hope my choices improve.

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