Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann

A childhood piano has a lacquered wing, a bartender thinks 'distant cities are designed precisely so that you can know where you come from,' that 'we bring home with us when we leave' and that feeling 'becomes more acute for the fact of having left.' The description of Dublin Bay has a Joycean sway. McCann can be a poetic writer, a wildly good writer. The book cites many poets: Yeats, Larkin, Stevens, Eliot Tillie the doomed hooker quotes the Persian poet Rumi, as if low and high worlds should not be separate or predictable. The tightrope walker is a bit of a ghost, perhaps fitting for the ghostly towers, the performer's haunted stage. The best parts are about the actual walk on the tightrope, about Philippe Petit, the lone walker in his slippers made of buffalo skin, about the group's illicit preparations and the stunning question of how to convey a very heavy cable across the yawning space between towers without being discovered or arrested. The Wire and a scene identical to a movie trailer where James Caan struggles to teach Hugh Grant how to say 'fuhgeddaboudit.' McCann hails from Dublin, but he lives in New York and his novel is a North American pastiche, alluding to Gatsby, Leonard Cohen, Denis Johnson, Ondaatje, McCann is a great optimist, evident when he has Tom Waits on a 1974 jukebox in an Irish bar.

Heavy metal has no home in NYC.Īlmost all characters are good or want to do good, despite hellish situations. Childhood prayers sound like jazz, computer keyboards sound like jazz, pages of Joyce read aloud sound like jazz, a flute sounds like jazz, the street sounds like jazz, a hooker in a neon swimsuit is even named Jazz. Let the Great World Spin often repeats the word jazz, possibly echoing Toni Morrison's New York City novelĬoming Through Slaughter. a hooker hanging herself in the prison showers, pimps beating the monk. Crucial events occur offstage and are told to the reader, e.g. Threads link the disparate characters, but there is a risk of voices just talking and talking and talking. U.S.A., the great John Dos Passos trilogy, perhaps like a fitful radio jumping stations, changing like the city itself. (I refuse to say the city is the main character I loathe that notion.) The book has many voices, perhaps like The novel keeps moving to new characters - a hooker, a judge, an artist, a subway rider - so in effect there is no main character. He marries a blonde heiress, returns to Dublin (a reverse diaspora) and makes heaps of money riding the Irish dot-com wave. Materially, the non-Christ figure brother fares better.

Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann