Hodgepodge 252/365 - Book Report (Let the Great World Spin)

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (2009) (7/7/17)

My last book report was on a little book by Colum McCann about writing. It was fine, but I had remembered being really impressed with a collection of short stories of his. Then it occurred to me that Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award, was kicking around my bookshelves somewhere. So I decided to read it next, especially given the blurbs: "one of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years"; "a blockbuster ground-breaking heartbreaking symphony of a novel"; "stunning" . . . "marvelously rich" . . . "gorgeously wrought." You get the picture.

And as I plunged in, I got as far as the prologue and, yes, was blown away. I started the book at dinner (we do that around here: read while eating together, just the two of us), and I was so impressed that I put down my fork and began reading out loud. The five-page prologue treats us to the daredevil feat of Philippe Petit on August 7, 1974, when, for forty-five minutes, he walked, nay danced, back and forth on a tightrope strung between the newly completed (and generally reviled) twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, with the aid only of a long balancing pole. But it's not really about Petit: he's just a dot in the sky, standing at the edge of a building 110 stories up, about to start. It's actually about the city and people below him, looking up, not believing their eyes, stopping and watching, hushed.

The book proper starts in Dublin, with the story of two brothers. It moves to New York, where one of the brothers, a Catholic monk of sorts (for want of a better description), relocates—and at the end of the first chapter, on the same day as Petit's walk, is killed in a car crash. From there, the world does, truly, spin, embracing a cavalcade cast of characters—a mother-daughter pair of hookers, a judge and his wife, four mothers of young men killed in Vietnam, computer hackers in California, a subway tag chronicler, an artist, a Guatemalan nurse, the Irish brother—whose stories, all told in various voices, intersect in sometimes small, sometimes larger ways. Petit, known only as "the walker," is featured in a couple of short chapters. But it's not his story. It's the story of all of us, in a way—but especially of people who have suffered loss and yet carry on regardless. Some of the stories are stronger/more compelling than others, but I applaud McCann for his audacity in trying to inhabit so many types (and voices) of characters.

Ah, but the writing! McCann is a master of pacing, and of voice and tone, and most remarkably, of emotion, especially sadness, regret, hope, sorrow, yearning. My book bristles with flags marking passages that struck me, for any of various reasons.

Here's an exchange between the two Irish brothers (the "monk," Corrigan, has fallen in love with the Guatemalan nurse, but he's torn because of his faith; the narrator is the other brother):

"You ever have the feeling there's a stray something or other inside you?" he [Corrigan] said. "You don't know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it's inside you. It's not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there's no way to get at it?" He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. "Well, here it is. Right here."
  We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
  "You're having me on, right?"
  "Wish I was," he said.
  "Come on now . . ."
  "You don't believe me?"
  "Jazzyln?" I asked, floored. "You haven't fallen for that hooker, have you?"
  He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence.
  "No," he said, "no, not Jazzlyn, no."

Or this, the nurse remembering the first (and only) time she and Corrigan made love:

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.

McCann's got five more novels and two volumes of novella/short stories that I haven't yet read. I think I'll be giving them a try too. But first: it's time for a big book. American Gods, here I come—for a little change of pace.