TLC Tours Presents: Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Release date: 2009 / 349 pages

Synopsis (from Amazon): 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. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. 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. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later...

First line: “Those who saw him hushed.”

Review: This novel was a reward for overcoming a weakness, a prejudical attitude, a sulk. I first began this novel months ago when it arrived from the library, but soon decided I just could not bear to read another novel about how New York City is the center of the universe, blah, blah, blah, so I returned it after reading only about 50 pages. Then, fate intervened in the form of TLC Tours! I decided to give it a go once again and boy am I glad.

First, while this novel is indeed set mostly in NYC, it is much, much bigger than its setting. In a word, this novel is a prism. Even when we think we understand what we are looking at, we are quickly startled by how much bigger, more significant, more beautiful the experience is than we ever could have expected. This novel illustrates that quality of life so well.

The narrative is similar to Olive Kitteridge in that it is a series of related vignettes. But while Kitteridge was joined by the title character’s presence, the characters in World are related in various, circuitous ways and to varying degrees. The elements of the narrative shift and reveal themselves in myriad forms. And, similar to life, I finished this novel realizing that while I most certainly had not deserved a second chance at World, I was so very grateful to have been given one.

One suggestion for anyone tackling this lovely, literary novel would be to not judge it on its setting, as I initially did, or on whether or not you particularly like the characters. For one thing, the perspective and point of view will change — fairly quickly — to another character quite different from the previous one. One of my initial fears was that I would be reading 300+ pages about prostitutes. Well, not only is this not true, it turns out that the “prostitutes” become “Tilly” and “Jazzlyn,” fully realized individuals, and I was eventually quite sorry to see them go.

This novel should be approached from a different angle than what we traditionally judge a novel upon as well – less on setting and character and more on how well it embodies what joins us all: our desires, our fears, our intuitions. And while New York City is quite vividly and specifically the setting, the significance of this novel is universal.

Let me try to illustrate the span of this novel with McCann’s own words:

Note this description of a priest trying to explain to his brother why he is called to serve prostitutes in NYC:

“…It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are…Bits of it floating in the air… It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s everywhere. What I mean is, we’re afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we stopped to take account of it, we’d just fall into despair. But we can’t stop. We’ve got to keep going.”

Or the beauty of trash in the projects:

“Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind… Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews… The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away.”

Note these thematic gems dropped casually throughout the narrative:

“I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.”

“The overexamined life… it’s not worth living.”

“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.”

“The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.”

”I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”

“Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around a while know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.”

“It had never occured to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.”