Review: Let the Great World Spin

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.

There are books that tell a great story then there are book that function like a literary painting. They take a single snapshot of an event then paint with words with the event and the events around them. The effect if done correctly is beautiful. This is what Let the Great world spin is like.

On a  late summer morning in 1974 people on the island of Manhattan look up and saw a tightrope walker between the towers.

What transpires below is average people living average lives all converge as the author paints a portrait of each one.

They are from all walks of life. Hookers trying to make a living and a socialite trying to get over the death of her son in the war. Such disparate lives are all somehow linked to a tightrope walker.

I think McCann has done a fabulous job of taking one event and shown how a bunch of seemingly random life’s are really at its heart interconnected. We often fail to think of the beauty that is inherent in these interconnected lives. If we stopped to think that one action can have so much negative effect then maybe we would be more aware in choosing our actions.

A problem can occur if a reader attempts to read this linearly. This is a novel that takes the reader around and around and up and down there is no straight line from point A to point B.  The beauty and the story is found in the circular ways and the what appears to be random interactions but really is not.

It is best to approach this work with as a literary painting rather than a novel with a nice arc in the plotline and a resolution at the end. In this novel there seems to be no beginning and end as the chapters weave in and out of charterers offering snapshots of what is happening right then,