Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: Colum McCann has worked some
exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel
of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of
1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal,"
and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious.
A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City
as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center
towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist
Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly
submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest,
heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young
artists, a Park Avenue judge. All their lives are ordinary and
unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging.
And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with
such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later.
You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives
one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular
world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to
birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving
residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very
air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage
we do or heal. And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip,
or step in something awful.
But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a
cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent
novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of
something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world,
"bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants." --Mari
Malcolm
Amazon Exclusive: Frank McCourt on Let the Great World Spin
Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to
Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and
returned to America in 1949. For thirty years he taught in New
York City high schools. His first book, Angela's Ashes, won the
Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the
L.A. Times Book Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Ellis
Island Family Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Field
of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey
Award for Excellence in Education. McCourt also wrote Tis and
Teacher Man, both memoirs. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review
of Let the Great World Spin:
Now I worry about Colum McCann. What is he going to do after
this blockbuster groundbreaking heartbreaking symphony of a
novel? No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived
deeper.
Trust me, this is the sort of book that you will take off your
shelf over and over again as the years go along. It’s a story of
the early 1970s, but it’s also the story of our present times.
And it is, in many ways, a story of a moment of lasting
redemption even in the face of all the evidence.
There are dozens of tales and threads at the core of
Let the Great World Spin. On one level there’s the tightrope
walker making his way across the World Trade Center towers. But
as the novel goes along the “walker” becomes less and less of a
focal point and we begin to care more about the people down
below, on the pavement, in the ordinary throes of their
existence. There’s an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects.
There’s a Park Avenue mother in mourning for her dead son, who
was blown up in the cafés of Saigon. There are the original
computer hackers who "visit" New York in an early echo of the
Internet. There’s an artist who has learn to return to the
simplicity of love. And then--in possibly the book’s wildest and
most ambitious section--there’s a Bronx hooker who has brought up
her children in “the house that horse built”--“horse” of course
being the heroin that was ubiquitous in the '70s.
All the voices feel realized and authentic and the writing
floats along. This was my city back then--and now. McCann has
written about New York before, but never quite as piercingly or
as provocatively as this. This is fiction that gets the heart
thumping.
The stories are interweaved so that it is one story, on one day,
in one city, and yet it is also a history of the present time. In
Let the Great World Spin, you can’t ignore the overtones for
today: suffice it to say that the novel is held together by an
act of redemption and beauty. I didn’t want to stop turning the
pages.
I’m really not sure what McCann will do after this, but this is
a great New York book, not just for New Yorkers but for anyone
who walks any sort of tightrope at all. And yes, it doesn’t
surprise me that it takes an Irishman to capture the heart of the
city... --Frank McCourt
(Photo © Kit DeFever)
- Used Book in Good Condition.