I remember hearing about Let the Great World Spin and thinking, “I should read that.” And because shoulds carry such little weight past a certain age, I didn’t. I ignored its National Book Award in 2009, its Prix Deauville shortly after, its Ambassador Book Award this year, Oprah’s urgings, Esquire’s confusing proclamation that this novel about New York in the 1970s was “the first great 9/11 novel.”
It is. And it isn’t. Colum McCann writes an entire city through a dozen or so lives, connected by a single length of cable. Above their heads, Philippe Petit walks (and runs, and dances) on a tightrope stretched between the Twin Towers. They all look up, catch their breath at the crazy, death-defying marvel. It really happened; the novel did not. Yet it’s the novel that stays grounded, its characters’ awkward grief, defiant love, raw selflessness, and gawky ambition brushing close.
The midair performance is fearless. But it’s the humanity that’s transcendent. Against his dramatic backdrop, McCann tells his stories quietly, in glances, flashes of understanding, seconds lit with grace. “The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own,” he writes— and that is exactly what his characters do.
I’ve seldom felt so held by a book, as though the author had a hand pressed gently, firmly at my back, and was guiding me through a crowd so expertly, there was no chance we’d be separated. McCann’s descriptions are always dead-on (“The bald spot was very white, like a little ice rink on his head”). Here’s how Gloria, a black woman who’s lost three sons in the war, reacts to a wealthy, lonely white woman who’s also lost her son, and hungers for Gloria’s steadying friendship: “I don’t know the words for how she looked at me—there are few words—it was a welling up, a rising, a lifting up on the surface from the water, it was the sort of thing that could not be told. It felt for a moment that something had unthreaded down my spine, and my skin got tight, but what could I say?”
McCann lets you inside lives and experiences you’d have trouble imagining without him. He writes of Petit: “It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness at his throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing.”
Rising above the city with him, you see it clearly. “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,” McCann writes. He suggests that New York “was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present.”
A present shattered and healed a million times a day.
Here’s McCann on the Midwest:
“In New York, at the racetrack, I loved to see the horses. Their flanks looked as blue as insect wings. They swished their manes back in the air. They were like Missouri to me. They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides.”
And on marriage:
“His face had softened: as if just being a moment with her had relaxed him, allowed him to be someone different. I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they’re the things that matter.”
