Let the Great World Spin

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke--stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper."

So begins Colum McCann's lyrical and powerfully moving Let the Great World Spin, the winner of the National Book Award. Set in New York City in August of 1974, with the Nixon resignation in the news, McCann follows a group of seemingly disparate but ultimately connected characters as French acrobat Philippe Petit audaciously wirewalks between the towers of the Word Trade Center.

Though Petit's stunt is the fulcrum of this book, and presumably sparked the idea in McCann's imagination, it is not in the forefront of the story. Like Icarus in Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which has the winged boy in the extreme background, Petit is on the periphery of the story. There are only a few sections of the book that deal with the nuts and bolts of his walk. Instead, McCann sees the event as representing something bigger in a 1974 New York City that was hot, dirty, and seething.

There are three main character groups: an Irish monk living in the Bronx, tending to the prostitutes who stroll underneath the Major Deegan Expressway; a married pair of artists, who have moved upstate to detox and escape the New York art scene, but make a fateful return visit; and a group of women who have all lost a son in Vietnam, with one of them, the wife of a judge, making a special bond with a black woman from the Bronx. There are a few other characters who pop up briefly, such as a photographer of graffiti and some computer programmers from Palo Alto who dial a pay-phone near the World Trade Center to get a first-hand account of Petit's walk.

Those scenes, which I remember only after leafing through the book as a refresher, could have been dropped without incident. It's the main characters who provide the meat of the tale. Corrigan, the Irish monk, is a fascinating fellow, who realizes he is in love with a nurse of Central American ancestry. Tille and Jazzlyn, mother and daughter as well as streetwalkers, are also memorably etched. McCann makes the daring choice to narrate the book in several voices. He is an Irishman, so when he gives us the view of Corrigan's brother, it seems appropriate, but when he has a chapter of Tillie, incarcerated, emitting a kind of stream of conscious riff, it's nervy but pays off. I don't know if he spent any time with ladies of the evening, but it sure seems like it.

Petit's stunt is the event on the periphery, but there is another incident that serves as an anchor to the story, an auto accident that is viewed from many different points of view, which makes the book seem like a screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga. This is even more apt a comparison when characters from the different groups meet coincidentally, making New York City seem awfully small (one character decides she's wants to find someone she met the night before and just happens to stumble upon him in a restaurant, even though she has no idea where he will be). These connections are cinematic (J.J. Abrams has bought the film rights) and give the reader several little "a-ha!" moments, but I think ultimately they cheapen the story a bit.

I'm also of two minds about a coda which takes place in 2006. It wraps up the character arcs nicely, but I'm wondering if McCann isn't trolling in middlebrow waters by wrapping the package so neatly. I did love his closing lines, which recalls the end of The Great Gatsby, which ended: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." McCann ends with: "The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough...The world spinning." Fitzgerald's ending suggests a never-ending struggle, while McCann is much more passive and accepting.