Save for a rueful coda set in 2006, it is a novel about beginnings rather than endings, and yet, like downtown New York itself, it is shadowed by a shadow no longer there, and one can scarcely imagine it being written without that opportunity for rue … It is a book so humane in its understanding of original sin that it winds up bestowing what might be called original absolution, and it is a pre-9/11 novel that delivers the sense that so many of the 9/11 novels have missed.
The walk is really little more than a cultural touchstone and a literary conceit, the event around which McCann has assembled his cast. But the metaphorical possibilities of the walker — the paradox of this innocent, unsanctioned act of divine delight being carried out between two buildings that would one day be so viciously and murderously destroyed — are hard to ignore, particularly in a novel so concerned with the twin themes of love and loss … It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one. Through their anguish, McCann’s characters manage to find comfort, even a kind of redemption.
By focusing the book and its characters through a single summer's day in 1974, the day a French tightrope-walker crossed a wire suspended between the World Trade Center buildings, the Irish writer Colum McCann offers us a glimpse into our collective past … These two women, Claire and Gloria, mirror each other like the twin towers that function as the central image of the book. As Philippe Petit managed to cross the divide between the World Trade Center buildings one summer day, these women traverse the great divides of race and class to become friends.
Petit hovers on the edges, a spectral force employed to accentuate both the splendor that humans can create as well as the muck that constitutes our quotidian lives. McCann's forlorn cast seeks to empower themselves, to swap the muck for the splendor … The author is not known to cut narrow slices, and here he wants to glorify life's interconnectedness … McCann can craft penetrating phrases but his theme is stale, and the exhaustive back stories he gives each character never pay off. McCann relies on streams of short sentences that can seem lazy and distracted.
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 … 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 light-hearted and desperate thoughts people really share; and he makes a theme out of compassion’s presence or lack in their lives.
McCann harks back to a time when New Yorkers gazed up at the towers in amazement, rather than horror … Told from multiple points of view, McCann performs his own gravity-defying act, swooping from prostitutes to priests, drug-addled artists to grieving mothers as his story unfolds around that morning … In terms of sheer lyricism, McCann pulls out all the stops...He mixes passages of great beauty with the profane heartbreak of a grief-stricken mother, who, in jail, reflects on her powerlessness to protect her daughter from poverty, prostitution, and her own addictions.
Through a Joycean tangle of voices — including that of a fictionalized Petit — he weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down … Like Joyce's Ulysses — also a portrait of a city and a day — the chapters' formats and prose styles vary widely … Not everyone here is admirable, but all are depicted with sympathy and care. Each leaves its own color on the book's canvas and then departs; no narrator is repeated except the tightrope walker, the conductor who has brought this orchestra together.
Out goes McCann on his own literary tightrope. He weaves an ambitious mosaic, mostly set on that summer day in 1974 … 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.
McCann’s characters are at the outset connected by only the thinnest of filaments – proximity and shared experiences and not much else – but through the machinations of the plot and by dint of mishap and employment and chance they become more connected, sometimes tragically … Some readers may wish the novel had more narrative to it, but McCann’s well-sketched characters and sense of place may be enough to satisfy.
McCann's brilliant conceit uses a fictionalized account of Philippe Petit's high-wire performance to bring the seemingly disparate lives of many watching or hearing about this ‘artistic crime of the century’ into a unified tale of love and heartbreak … McCann's writing is symphonic; the introduction alone is like a soliloquy one can read over and over again for its beautiful resonance. Open to any page and you'll hear everyday music.
Let the Great World Spin is a set of larger and smaller stories that approach, intersect, and diverge. Mainly they coincide with the twin towers walk, though some begin earlier and extend decades afterward … McCann gives a superb account of the walker’s long practicing, and his careful handling and rigging of the wire. His description of the walk itself would do a ballet critic proud. And if some of his other attempts to elevate work into myth are strained, he succeeds with his image of a flight that lifts the heaviness of a whole city.
On the day that ‘the tightrope walker’ (never named, but obviously modeled on Philippe Petit) strolls between the Twin Towers, other New Yorkers are performing quieter acts of courage … Unfocused and overlong, though written with verve, empathy and stylistic mastery.
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
