Review
Let the Great World Spin: A Novel by Colum McCann
Meanwhile, Solomon's wife, Claire, meets with a group of mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam. McCann's dogged, DeLillo-like ambition to show American magic and dread sometimes comes unfocusedJohn Corrigan in particular never seems realbut he succeeds in giving us a high-wire performance of style and heart. g All rights reserved.. It is the aftermath, in which Petit appears in the courtroom of Judge Solomon Soderberg, that sets events into motion. This was my city back then--and now. One of them, Gloria, lives in the same building where John lived, which is how Claire, taking Gloria home, witnesses a small salvation. Also killed is John Corrigan, a priest who was giving her a ride. 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. 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. All the voices feel realized and authentic and the writing floats along. And yes, it doesnt surprise me that it takes an Irishman to capture the heart of the city... --Frank McCourt (Photo Kit DeFever)McCann's sweeping new novel hinges on Philippe Petit's illicit 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers. I didnt want to stop turning the pages. McCann has written about New York before, but never quite as piercingly or as provocatively as this. 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 are the original computer hackers who "visit" New York in an early echo of the Internet. 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. McCourt also wrote Tis and Teacher Man, both memoirs. In Let the Great World Spin, you cant ignore the overtones for today: suffice it to say that the novel is held together by an act of redemption and beauty. On one level theres the tightrope walker making his way across the World Trade Center towers. 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. Theres an artist who has learn to return to the simplicity of love. This is fiction that gets the heart thumping. 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. Times Book Award. Its a story of the early 1970s, but its also the story of our present times. Theres an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects. His first book, Angela's Ashes, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. And it is, in many ways, a story of a moment of lasting redemption even in the face of all the evidence. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later. 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 gwas born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and returned to America in 1949. Theres a Park Avenue mother in mourning for her dead son, who was blown up in the cafs of Saigon. 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. And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Let the Great World Spin: Now I worry about Colum McCann. And then--in possibly the books wildest and most ambitious section--theres 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. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks gbetween World Trade Center towers. There are dozens of intimate tales and threads at the core of Let the Great World Spin. 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. For thirty years he taught in New York City high schools. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. 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.