Book Review: Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

Take an unexpected but momentous public event. Use it as the backdrop for the stories of ordinary New Yorkers. Show that no matter what happens in the day-to-day, our private lives go on.

Such is the simple theme of Let the Great World Spin. McCann tells about the lives of those who populate New York while a French tightrope walker does the unthinkable -- strings a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and takes a walk, and a run, and a dance. As Philippe Petit carries out his feat on a summer day in 1974 and thousands watch from a quarter-mile below, millions of others -- priests and judges, mothers and hookers, hippies and housewives -- go about their daily lives.

McCann's storytelling and writing is spectacular. His characters portray the raw emotions of  New York life in all its ugliness and triumph. He tells us the backstories of these men and women, then lets them loose to live. They are mostly good people, flawed perhaps, and struggling to understand how they fit into the world. Occasionally, they come together in times of joy and sorrow, tragedy and hope.

Philippe Petit takes a tightrope walk across the
towers of the World Trade Center on Aug. 7, 1974

McCann's breadth is superb. He gives us tales of city life from the historical perspective of the time, as the country moves away from the Vietnam War and sees the end of the Nixon presidency. Some of his best writing comes on the opening pages of the book, as he describes the city awakening to another hot August day.

Car horns. Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pothole.

The vivid descriptions continue. Late in the book, one of the characters, a black woman who understands the world, tells of her strategy as she writes home to her rural parents about her life on a college scholarship: "I gave them all of the truth and none of the honesty." Another talks about how to never expect life to give you a fair shake.

If you think of the world without people, it's the most perfect thing there ever was. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It's like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom, and she's just giving it her all, she's singing just for you, she's on fire, this is a special request for (you), and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains. At the end of the world, they're gonna have cockroaches and Barry Manilow records. 

But the novel belies that statement. It's neither a cockroach nor a maudlin Manilow melody, but a taut and terrific tale woven from a true story.