Let the Great World Spin

It's so hard to come down from a good book (Mudbound, in this case) so Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin could have suffered from the rebound. Fortunately, it turned out to be an excellent transition book. Great World takes some work, I'll admit that. There are a lot of characters, though they're fairly easy to keep track of--I won't say to keep separate because it turns out they all come together.

McCann uses Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers (see the movie Man on Wire) as a framing device or a focal point for his motley collection of characters. While Petit is plotting and then executing his walk above the world, the rest of New York is going about its business. The prostitutes are getting picked up in the Bronx for existing; their self-appointed protector and Irish monk Corrigan is trying to save them while also choosing between his God and the woman he loves; Corrigan's brother is watching him in bewilderment as he fades away; women from different walks of life and different bouroughs are coming together to mourn their sons killed in Vietnam; and a young artist and her husband are driving home after a rough night of cocaine (there was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise). Their ride is what sets the world in the book spinning and all these characters are brought together, even if they don't all physically meet.

McCann's writing can be a bit much, especially in the beginning. He writes: Hours and hours of insanity and escape. He's describing the projects in the Bronx, but what does that mean? Feels like he's trying too hard at first, but later, I stopped noticing some of those tics. I didn't mind: ...the morning already ovened up and muggy. And later I found many, many images or turns of phrases that I loved. For example, the women who get together to mourn their sons over breakfast are from the extreme of the Bronx projects to Park Avenue. Claire is a little embarrassed for Gloria, who lives in the projects, but not nearly as embarrassed as she is to admit to the group of very ordinary women who don't know one another all that well, that she lives on the Upper East Side. ...and then Janet, the blonde, leaned forward and piped up: Oh, we didn't know you lived up there.

Up there. As if it were somewhere to climb. As if they would have to ascend to it. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

Of course, anybody who's ever tried to traverse NYC knows how long it does take to get from one extreme to the other. Maybe you do need special equipment. How nice of McCann to put it metaphorically.

This book is hard to describe because it has so much going on, but I loved dipping into the lives of all the different characters. Sometimes it was hard to let go of one character to read about the next because I wanted to follow the story I was in, but then a chapter or two later, we'd catch up again. In the end, Let The Great World Spin, jumps ahead to 2006. I like that there's no mention of the towers long gone by that point and McCann doesn't mention Philippe Petit either. Instead we get a young woman making her way to Claire's Upper East Side home in a sort of homecoming and we see that the world has spun on its way, casting off or flinging far and wide the various characters we'd gotten to know in the 1970s section of the book. It's an intriguing book for a patient reader.

side note: The cover is really neat, drawn by Matteo Pericoli who is known for his pencil drawings of skylines. He's got a book of the skyline of Manhattan which came out awhile ago now but is worth a look.