It is a lovely cover design, don't you think? When closed, you see a sketch of a fragment of a city, from the front a tight rope walker with a destination but not an origin in sight. When open, the symbolism of a suspended walk that ties the ends of the city together as it swings out from a central and developed position near the spine becomes apparent. It is admittedly an obvious symbolism but that is perhaps intentional. Will the reader accept the large picture of the novel drawn upon a backdrop of an iconic city, with its ties to 9/11? With the burden of macro-views seeking micro-insights?
Readers tend to fall within two camps in their reactions to Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Much the same positions that New Yorkers in the book divided into as they watched Philippe Petit go out for a walk on a very thin wire stretched between the two towers of the World Trade Center - most hoping that he succeeds and some willing him to fall. The grandiosity of the gesture, both the walk and the authorial assumption of such weighted material, invites skepticism. But I love this book. For a variety of reasons I realize as I sit to write this.
One critic described McCann's writing in Let the Great World Spin as "disciplined," but I find it just the opposite mostly. Expansive, meandering, and occasionally lacking in precision while still being so evocative. McCann inhabits a diverse cast of characters, and seeks a symbolic unity in the one minute that all look up to the unlikely between the two towers. It is a novel fittingly written by an Irish man turned American seeking to define an American identity in a moment in 1974 that looks forward to another moment in 2001. And he writes it in a uniquely American way - full of emotion and hope with the more difficult realities suppressed to a solitary moment for many of the characters. Occasionally outward performances that disguise internal realities. Scripting much in the same way we have defined our national identity at times. That eternally optimistic American way of believing in the next great possibility no matter the present circumstances. And the slight nod to the fact that there are consequences for our willingness to engage in self-deceptions.
McCann's vision is huge, like the entirety of a city. I was hesitant to read this at first because the concept struck me as too difficult to pull off without becoming trite. But his ambition and heart is so fitting in an attempt to reconcile opposing camps within society in a novel that becomes an oddly eloquent exorcism of grief. It moved me.
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