From the Publisher
“This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it’s a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There’s so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”–Dave Eggers, editor of McSweeney’s and author of What Is the What
“In his own gritty and lyrical voice, Colum McCann has lifted up a handful of souls to the light in this big-hearted, adroit and probing novel, and brought forth a spectrum of the painful, the beautiful and the unexpected.”–Amy Bloom, author of Away
“Every character … grabs you by the throat and makes you care. McCann's dazzling polyphony walks the high wire and succeeds triumphantly.”–Emma Donoghue, author of The Sealed Letter
“What a book! Complex and captivating … a very sensual novel.”–John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
“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.”–Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes
“With Philippe Petit’s breathless 1974 tightrope walk between the uncompleted WTC towers at its axis, Colum McCann offers us a lyrical cycloramic high-low portrait of New York City in its days of burning; Park Avenue matrons, Bronx junkies, Center Street judges, downtown artists and their uptown subway-tagging brethren, street priests, weary cops, wearier hookers, grieving mothers of an Asian war freshly put to bed; a masterful chorus of voices all obliviously connected by the most ephemeral vision; a pin-dot of a man walking on air 110 stories above their heads.”–Richard Price, author of Lush Life
“Stunning… [an] elegiac glimpse of hope…It’s a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it’s a novel about families – the ones we’re born into and the ones we make for ourselves.”–USA Today
“The first great 9/11 novel...Let the Great World Spin stands as a kind of corrective to Don DeLillo’s remorselessly precise and punishing Falling Man…It is a pre-9/11 novel that delivers the sense that so many of the 9/11 novels have missed: We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air.”–Esquire
“Mesmerizing…A Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day….Colum McCann’s marvelously rich novel…weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down.”–Seattle Times
“Vibrantly whole… With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life…And as always, McCann’s heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow. A-”–Entertainment Weekly
“An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.”–O, The Oprah Magazine, oprah.com’s “Books You Can’t Put Down” Summer Reading List Selection
“The Great New York Novel. With echoes of Wolfe, Doctorow, and DeLillo, Colum McCann’s mesmerizing Let the Great World Spin is a prophetic portrait of New York City in the summer of 1974…A fine introduction to a major talent. It is one of the year’s best novels.”–Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast
“McCann…both resurrects and redeems the horrors of Sept. 11, creating a metaphorical landscape of human endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy…. This is McCann's gift, finding grace in grief and magic in the mundane.”–San Francisco Chronicle, Top Shelf: Recommended Reading Selection
“A shimmering, shattering novel. 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.”–Booklist, starred
“Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity...A magnificent novel…hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later.”–The Courier-Dispatch, Louisville KY
“If William Butler Yeats and Allen Ginsberg had written a novel together, it would be this sad, this deep, this urban, this manic and this highly charged.…. McCann’s power – his language, his human understanding, his vision–holds us in an embrace as encompassing as the great world itself.”–Buffalo News
“Beautiful, heady…As worn down as McCann's characters are, they each struggle heroically against life's downward pull, and that's what makes the novel so powerfully uplifting.”–Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Seductive [with a] propulsive pace…This is a New York teeming with leathery men and vicious beauties. The city itself is a stalled machine. People don't arrive here; they crawl into it. McCann's style is lyrical and sharp, as he expertly weaves together the lives of a handful of seemingly disparate characters.”–The Oregonian
“If major writers like Don DeLillo and Jay McInerney failed to capture the diversity of voices affected by tragedy in their early attempts at Sept. 11 novels, McCann succeeds…. In the end, McCann sees hope in a country that has, like his own narrative, recognized the voices of all its people. Hope in recognizing our flaws as a nation. And hope, despite the war we’re still in, of learning from our mistakes.”–Kansas City Star
“A sprawling, lyrical new book…Colum McCann [is a] novelist you should know a lot more about.”–New York Magazine
“McCann masterfully delineates each character’s voice… He lends a forgiving tenderness that invigorates the timeless notion that we are not really all the different under the skin, each of us longing for love, for beauty, for those connections that will quell our loneliness.”–Bookpage
From the Hardcover edition.
Publishers Weekly
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)
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The Barnes & Noble Review
Raised in Dublin and relocated to New York City, the Irish novelist Colum McCann has been confined in his fiction to no one place, time, or culture. His novel Zoli chronicled a fictional woman poet of the Romani people, while Dancer wove its wide research into the intimately imagined story of Rudolf Nureyev, the driven ballet genius born into Soviet poverty. In an earlier novel, This Side of Brightness, McCann explored the tunnels that run beneath Manhattan, using them as a landscape, a window onto history, and a symbol of life that carries on out of sight, in spite of society's best effort to neglect it.
McCann's new novel expands on the theme of high and low, opening with an act of derring-do in the sky that becomes a touchstone for the story's earthbound characters. Let the Great World Spin (the title comes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, riffing on themes in old Arabic poetry) is again set in New York, and much of its action takes place on a day in August 1974. Early that morning -- in real life, not just this novel -- a Frenchman named Philippe Petit used a bow and arrow to sling into place a cable uniting the giant Twin Towers of the recently built World Trade Center. Then, unbelievably, he walked across this cable. He laid down on it and got back up, twirled, and ignored, with puckish bravado, police calls for him to desist; you may have seen the event memorialized in the absorbing 2008 documentary Man on Wire. In a prologue, McCann introduces the image of this artist-madman -- a dot in the air beneath which skeptical but amazed New York crowds gather, nervous to name what they see. "The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before."
The story then shifts to render the lives of a series of characters at around the time of Petit's walk. The first voice we hear belongs to an Irishman in his early 30s named Ciaran Corrigan. Not yet focused on a life goal for himself, a worried Ciaran has come to town to visit the younger brother who has confounded him since their childhood in 1950s Dublin Bay (a setting quickly and casually yet vividly evoked by McCann.) The brother is called just Corrigan, or sometimes Corrie. He is blue-eyed and handsome, with a magnetic sincerity. He's always been comfortable among lowlifes, and in his way he's a rebel -- but his way is the devout way of charity, maybe even of self-sacrifice. Now skinny and sunken-cheeked, Corrigan is a kind of radical monk living in a project in the Bronx, lending rides to the elderly and his brave but weak protection to prostitutes. In return the women taunt but secretly adore him.
The atmosphere at first seems squalid to Ciaran, and menacing: razor-wire, heroin needles, women with straps for clothes soliciting as cars speed past on the Major Deegan Expressway. This is New York in the '70s, after all, a place whose crime-ridden breakdown was notorious enough to fuel a slew of classic movies. But Ciaran also starts to see that there is some beauty, "something to be recognized and rescued, some joy." In the novel's lackadaisical structure, McCann feels free to switch back and forth between first-person and third-person voices. Ciaran's narration introduces us to a few characters who will eventually speak for themselves -- or at least star in their own portion of the story, omnisciently narrated. There's Tillie, for instance, a still-pretty black prostitute and addict, tough on the surface, simultaneously withered and flailing inside due to regret and the harshness of a life that has known kindness only twice. And there's Adelita, a widowed young mother of two from Guatemala, for whom the almost saintly Corrigan has developed a man's feelings. She returns feelings of her own, raising the question of what to do about it.
But fate in this novel does not care about plans. While the tightrope walker is up in the air an incident occurs below that reroutes many paths. The repercussions move outward: to a white artist who has allowed her career to get stalled by a pseudo-bohemian boyfriend and a coke habit. Also to a Park Avenue matron, apparently privileged -- but, inside, almost wholly defined by the grief of losing her son, a budding computer wizard, in Vietnam.
In different voices framed by their different worldviews, McCann's characters describe images that haunt their memory, the imperfect choices they have made -- or sometimes just the thick texture of their day. McCann extends compassion to his characters, exploring the kinds of lighthearted and desperate thoughts people really share; and he makes a theme out of compassion's presence or lack in their lives. The quality appears in some of them suddenly, like grace, but acting on it guarantees them no karmic protection against harm. Similarly, McCann presents the nutty beauty of the wire-walker's gesture as something that briefly wields transformative power. The unpredicted can be hopeful, absurd, exhilarating. Yet this offered no protection whatsoever nearly three decades later, on September 11th, as McCann knows his readers cannot help but be aware.
If anything, at times the themes of Let the Great World Spin seem a bit too well established, the characters illustrative, even as McCann's portraits of them offer some intense and lovely moments. A minor character or two feel like a type from the period, and sometimes when the characters wax poetic or philosophical about time or human nature they sound distractingly like the novelist talking.
Interested though McCann is in those who fall off their life's wire -- whether through error, random luck, or cruel circumstance denying them the chance to thrive -- he is most compelling here writing of survival. The novel nears its close with the strong voice of Gloria, a black woman originally from Missouri. From the outside she looks like a sweet, fat old church lady. But this turns out to be a consciously worn mask hiding her wry judgments, her weary self-protection, and her giving up on God after too much loss. Near the beginning of the novel Corrigan framed the problem with life as he saw it: "All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again." When her test comes, Gloria stays true to herself and meets it with resolve. In another novelist's hands her kind of perseverance might feel like the expected happy ending. In this novel it is a welcome, suspenseful exception to the rule. --Sarah Kerr
Sarah Kerr is a contributor to the Barnes & Noble Review.
