In the summer of 1974, a tiny figure walks high above New York City, a man trotting and dancing and even lying down on a wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Center. One tower is still in scaffolding, “like a wounded thing.” A prescient 1974 photo in the book shows the tiny figure on a wire and a jetliner looming large behind him, as if the plane will enter the tower.
The man on the wire is a unifying visual element: Action in the metropolis unfolds beneath him, penthouse and underworld and heaven and hell brought close. Crime seems rampant, Nixon is impeached, war vets are home and the United States has endured a decade of assassinations. New York City is bankrupt and the Bronx is on fire, a borough out of Dante. Like our time, it is a world at war with itself as much as against others.
Let the Great World Spin
, by Colum McCann, HarperCollins, 350 pages, $32.99
Two Irish brothers seem the dominant characters at first. One brother is a monk who wants to do good, a bit of a Christ figure in his sandals, long hair and carpenter pants. Locked in his room, he rises again, opens his door to hookers to use the john (ha), he faces temptation and turns the other cheek when beaten by pimps. This brother is good, but what does he accomplish? He falls in love, but does not inherit the Earth.
Materially, the non-Christ figure brother fares better. He marries a blonde heiress, returns to Dublin (a reverse diaspora) and makes heaps of money riding the Irish dot-com wave. The novel keeps moving to new characters – a hooker, a judge, an artist, a subway rider – so in effect there is no main character. (I refuse to say the city is the main character; I loathe that notion.) The book has many voices, perhaps like U.S.A., the great John Dos Passos trilogy, perhaps like a fitful radio jumping stations, changing like the city itself. Threads link the disparate characters, but there is a risk of voices just talking and talking and talking. Crucial events occur offstage and are told to the reader, e.g. a hooker hanging herself in the prison showers, pimps beating the monk.
Let the Great World Spin often repeats the word jazz, possibly echoing Toni Morrison's New York City novel Jazz and Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. 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. Heavy metal has no home in NYC.
Almost all characters are good or want to do good, despite hellish situations. McCann is a great optimist, evident when he has Tom Waits on a 1974 jukebox in an Irish bar. 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, Fort Apache – the Bronx, The Wire and a scene identical to a movie trailer where James Caan struggles to teach Hugh Grant how to say “fuhgeddaboudit.”
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. Petit, however, has only a small part. The tightrope walker is a bit of a ghost, perhaps fitting for the ghostly towers, the performer's haunted stage.
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. McCann can be a poetic writer, a wildly good writer. 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.
Perhaps this novel is an experiment in multiple voices after the author published two books with strong central characters, Dancer, about Rudolf Nureyev, and Zoli , about a strong-willed Roma woman.
Curiously, Steven Galloway's Ascension, a 2004 novel, features a Roma tightrope walker spanning the twin towers, as if the seed for two of McCann's books grew from Galloway's one volume.
McCann's choice of era is inspired in showing that the United States is always in crisis, always in a just war, and always at war with itself. The country seems to lose its innocence over and over, but does not remember, a cultural amnesia to which we are all prone. This may not be the novel's point, but it is a valuable lesson in what seem like unsettled times. Times are always unsettled; we're always walking on a wire.
Mark Anthony Jarman latest book is the story collection My White Planet. He is fiction editor of The Fiddlehead and plugged numerous jukeboxes in the United States in the 1980s.
