Cocaine and naked bodies -- When I got to this unconventional love scene in the gloriously dizzying novel and National Book Award Winner for Fiction, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, I scribbled in the margins of the book, "Will write something that I erotic before I die." Re-read the scene about two more times. Crossed out my words and wrote, "Will do something that erotic in my lifetime." So, goes my interactive adventure with a novel that made me want to write, cry, laugh, and send the author a box of chocolates, my bra, and a note of my endearing love.
McCann's latest novel has no plot in sight, complex character development, a non-linear timeline, no consistency in voice, tone, or narrative style, and prose that flows like poetry with cleverness and tender tragedy underpinning each sentence. Let the Great World Spin is as flawless, delicate and magical as Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who on August 7, 1974 walked across a tightrope between the World Trade Center Towers. His gravity defying, law-breaking spectacle connects the fibers of about a dozen diverse narratives that unfold in the foreground of a decaying, corrupt, debaucherous New York City, loaded with prostitutes, drugs, and anti-Vietnam sentiment.
On that hot summer day, spectators were mesmerized by a man more than a quarter-mile above the streets of Manhattan, who appeared in a the sky "like a pencil mark, most of which had been erased." He did not just walk but danced on top a tightrope seven or eight times before finally handing himself over to the police. For a moment, his gesture of artistic recklessness silenced and captured the imagination of a city that does not stop moving. While his act of defiance and beauty is being performed miraculously in the metropolitan skyline, more subtle events of love, loss, and forgiveness, redemption take place below as the lives a dozen or so characters violently crash into each other or gently bump each in a brief moment of happenstance.
New York serves as the perfect setting to hold and sustain an eclectic cast of tragically beautiful characters who are as dynamic and unsettled as the city itself. McCann writes of the Big Apple, “It 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. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood." Much like the city, this characters are too busy seeking redemption and rebuilding their lives to dwell on the past; and it is through their desire to move forward and to get beyond loss that their lives overlap.
Two Irish immigrant brothers, a monk and a quiet drifter who live in the projects and minister to the downtrodden, befriend a mother-daughter prostitute team whose lives tragically intersect with a strung out bohemian married couple, who after a catastrophic event seek out a loving, well-educated black single mother who has a special relationship with a pampered but damaged Park Avenue mother who is mourning the loss of her son in Vietnam and is married to the judge who sentences both the tightrope walker and the prostitutes.
The interconnectedness between the characters isn't always obvious and sometimes blindsides the reader, but waiting for the nuanced ways that McCann interweaves the characters lives leads to the suspense and artfulness of his yarn. As one of the Irish brothers explains, "...everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.”
Very much a story of six degrees of separation, the disparate stories are brought together by chance and sentiment more than complicated plot or a strong main character that drives the story and brings colorful supporting characters along for the ride. There is no main character in this novel. Each one of these characters are strong enough to have their own novel; they are individual narratives; stand-alone vignettes that are woven together in a detailed mosaic that glows and resonates. There is no "about" that unifies this book; no all encompassing theme or motif. Love, loss, fear, risk-taking, redemption, family, politics, crime, and re-invention abound equally in this novel. It is very much a book that encompasses the fleeting nature of art. Not just art in the aesthetic sense but art in the everyday articulation of life. This can be see in the way the aerialist transforms himself "....into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past.’’
Much like the wire walkers's ephemeral statue, I too have created a temporary expression of art inside the margins of this wonderful book that I must erase. My co-workers at the library get really pissed when I write in books. Although my scrawlings must be erased, my love for this triumph of a novel will remain as I continue to recommend this awe-inspiring work to my library patrons.
