Fiction
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
I was fairly annoyed when I had to buy my copy of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Is it too much to ask that the public library to carry the recipient of last year’s National Book Award? Then again, I was all the more frustrated when I had to buy a second copy of the book, after I left my first one on a plane. Physician, heal thyself! (To add insult to injury, the next airline passenger to sit in my seat probably reached his hand in the pouch and said, “Hey, SkyMall!”)
Let the Great World Spin was such a good book, though, that I wasn’t going to wait on the library to get it before I’d complete it. While the literary press seems to have anointed the novel as the best in a long time—I wouldn’t go that far—I think it will become a work of abiding resonance for me.
It’s not a problem to relate what the book is about, but what it’s about is more elusive. For the first, Let the Great World Spin sets its axis in New York City, August 1974. Every chapter spotlights a different protagonist, each one of which intersecting with the others. We encounter a wealthy, Jewish judge, a mother grieving over a son recently lost to Vietnam, an Irishman come to the city for his monkish brother, a druggie artist, a Latino graffitist, an African-American woman in the Bronx projects, and others. McCann traces the lives of every one from the past and into this August day. Some of the portraits are more richly drawn than others, but by and large his treatments are very humane, closely observed, and deeply felt. (I commend McCann as well for capturing many different voices; as the focus shifts from person to person, no two chapters are written in the same style.) All of these men and women are struggling to overcome to smallness of their souls by means not always successful but without fail imbued with nobility for trying.
The absolute “center” of Let the Great World Spin, however, moves us towards what the book is about. Drawing from an apparently true story, in the late summer of ‘74, a tight rope walker stretched a line across the Twin Towers and spent hours one day strutting, running, jumping, and rolling back and forth on it, as a city watched transfixed beneath his feet. Periodically throughout the novel, we’re given a few pages that recount the past and present of the funambulist (always a fun word at parties), culminating in his spectacular arrest. The walker serves as a focal point for all of the other characters, as at different times they each look up and see the man.
Beyond acting as a structuring device for the narrative, the tight rope walker is the key to the book. Of all the major players in Let the Great World Spin, he is by far the most sketchily drawn, but that lack of detail allows him to function more as a symbol than a person; he’s a blank slate onto which all the others affix their aspirations. What they want, he achieves:
[On the wire] was the only time he could lose himself completely. . . Get rid of this foot. This toe. This calf. Find the place of immobility. So much of it was about the old cure of forgetting. To become anonymous to himself, have his own body absorb him. And yet there were overlapping realities: he also wanted his mind to be in that place where his boy was at ease.
Only on top of the world looking down does anyone find freedom and ease. The other characters yearn for that: a beautiful existence unfettered by gravity.
Of course, gravity, so to speak, is the whole problem, but we can look up, and luminosity sometimes descends. A woman recalls her mother and father: “My mother [died] first, my father a broken man one week later. I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.” A dying grandmother remarks, “The only thing worth grieving over. . . was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.” Later on, another “thinks again of an apricot—she does not know why, but that’s what she thinks, the skin of it, the savor, the sweetness. The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”
And so McCann bravely stretches the canvas as far as it can go. But I’d want to ask him, Is beauty really enough? (I think I’d give a qualified “yes” to this one), and, If so, how can it be sustained? “‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty’—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” is simultaneously true and false. Across the Sea, Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh has written:
Enter in and be a part
Of the world’s frustrated heart,
Drive the golf ball of despair,
Supperdance away your care.
Be ordinary.
Be saving up to marry.
Kiss her in the alleyway.
Part—“Same time, same place”—and go.
Learn repose on Boredom’s bed,
Deep, anonymous, unread,
And the god of Literature
Will touch a moment to endure.
If all we have to look up to, ultimately, is the god of Literature, we may be in trouble. If something more, however, beauty will endure beyond a moment.
General disclaimer: I’ve been reluctant over the last couple of years to start a blog, because I’ve thought to myself that I’d have trouble figuring out things to say, or spend too much time trying to fill a blogospace. But, it seems that one thing I could do would be to keep track of books that I’ve read (plus music), jot down a paragraph about each, and post everything online.
I hope that this list is helpful to people both to give some ideas about what to read (and what not to read), and also to open a window into how I personally process through books and consider issues related to Christ and culture. (In addition, I won’t try to write anything particularly controversial, but I offer these words just as one man’s perspective and maybe some food for thought for others. These aren’t ex cathedra pronouncements that bind anyone into agreeing with me.)