Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

Colum McCann opens Let the Great World Spin with an absolutely gripping third-person description of the minutes before Philippe Petit stepped onto a wire spanning the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974. In the next chapter, he abruptly shifts to a first-person narrative of Ciaran Corrigan living in post-War Dublin, and the reader (or at least this reader) is momentarily disoriented. But McCann deftly draws not only Ciaran and his brother ( a monk), but a city full of other seemingly unrelated characters into a story of events in New York before, on, and after August 7. These characters include hookers in the Bronx, a "breakfast club" of mothers who lost sons in Vietnam, two artists who have dropped out of New York's club culture and moved upstate, a den of early hackers who hear about Petit's daring walk by calling a phone booth in Manhattan, the judge who hears Petit's case, and Petit himself.

The New York Times reviewer Jonathan Mahler compared Let the Great World spin to the movie Crash (which, perhaps not coincidentally, I loved), and the web of connections among the characters is similar, both in its strengths and weaknesses. But Petit's walk provides a more compelling and uplifting (pun intended) motif than the Los Angeles car culture. While the characters in Let the Great World Spin suffer grievous losses, many are also resilient; though damaged, they manage to construct lives that have meaning.

While McCann's book was a finalist for the National Book Award, reviewers have picked a variety of nits with it, including historical inaccuracies and what Wall Street Journal reviewer Kyle Smith called a tone of "quiet please, poetry being manufactured." Mr. Smith's snarkiness notwithstanding, I found the writing evocative and the book both engaging and rewarding. I nominated it for Novel Conversations to read, and I'm sad the group didn't pick it, as I think it would provoke great discussion.

Favorite passages:

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

. . . everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.