Let the Great World Spin

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

Several writers have tried to write about the World Trade Center since 2001.  I hope you have read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example, which was a deeply moving novel that addressed that grief head on.

Colum McCann does so only indirectly in his new book, Let the Great World Spin, which is set in 1974.  But the gorgeous complexity and emotional depth of his novel can’t help but be a tribute to the towers and the city and all of the lives lost.  As the author says in his endnote, “Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down:  there are still so many stories to be told.”

On the day when a daring funambulist walks a tightrope between the newly built Twin Towers, the lives of several characters intersect in unforeseen ways. 

Dubliner Cieran Corrigan is visiting his exasperating brother, Corrie, a monk who has found his calling among New York City’s prostitutes.  Claire Soderberg is nervously readying her Park Avenue apartment for a meeting of her support group, four women who have lost sons to the Vietnam War, while her husband, a judge is pondering the best way to handle the tightrope walker’s trespassing case.  Corrie is giving a ride to one of the young prostitutes, Jazzlyn; and Lara, an artist, is in the car that clips their van, sending it into a guardrail.  And so on.

Those are just a few of the characters who in turn narrate the novel, and each of their stories echoes and amplifies the others in rich and wonderful ways.  Of course, only the tightrope walker, Philippe Petit, is a real person.  But each section of the book is so beautifully crafted that the reader is left with a wonderful sense of the busy, risky world.

This is what fiction is for—I can’t recommend this one enough.