Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is easily my favorite read of the year. This was one of those books that everyone had been talking about for years, and I simply hadn’t gotten around to opening it yet. What I found was a triumphant novel that interconnects lives on both the micro and macro levels in 1974 New York City during Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers — a visceral opening scene that immediately ties together the lives of the characters who witness it.
“We all lived in the same city, but no two lived in the same New York.”
This central high-wire act, performed without safety equipment, permission, announcement, or even prior public knowledge, becomes the novel’s defining metaphor. McCann’s narrative dances among countless characters, each balancing their own delicate and often fatal tensions within their lives and relationships. It is a distinctly American — or perhaps more accurately, “only in New York” — kind of Russian novel, sprawling in scope and rich with thematic ambition. The book moves across guilt, race, class, addiction, war, faith, grief, love, and devotion, all while portraying characters who are intimately connected to the small island of Manhattan yet simultaneously isolated within its vast ocean of millions.
“Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life.”
We move among narrators in a kaleidoscope of spectacle, both loud and quiet. Corrigan, an Irish monk, provides the emotional spine of the story. Rather than serving in a traditional church or monastery, he ministers primarily to the prostitutes and forgotten people of the Bronx. He lives alongside the recovering addict Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn, and he eventually falls in love with Adelita, a Guatemalan nurse, forcing him to confront the tension between spiritual devotion and earthly love.
“What turns the heart black is not the weight of grief but the manner of its bearing.”
Early in the novel, a tragic accident sends emotional shockwaves through the narrative and draws many of the characters together. We meet a support group of mothers whose sons were killed in Vietnam, including a wealthy Upper East Side woman who forms an unlikely friendship with a Black woman raising children on her own. Elsewhere, we encounter early hackers infiltrating the phone system and making random calls across the city as they watch Petit’s walk unfold. Again and again, McCann reveals the invisible threads connecting seemingly unrelated lives.
“Nobody can hold the whole thing in their head.”
In truth, this is a difficult novel to summarize through plot alone because its power lies so heavily in its thematic and emotional architecture. Like the towers of the World Trade Center themselves, the novel feels enormous. New York City emerges as the book’s central character more than anything else, and this moment in history becomes its defining balancing point. The characters, like Petit on the wire, exist between catastrophe and transcendence, balancing against powerful forces with the constant risk of falling. And many of them do fall — addicts relapse, characters die, relationships fracture, and hope often feels as thin as the one-inch steel cable Petit walks across.
“The city feeds us and it feeds on us.”
Considering the novel was published in 2009, only a few years after 9/11, the parallels between the characters’ balancing acts, the looming presence of the Twin Towers, and the tragedy that readers know awaits them lend the novel an unmistakable emotional depth. The symbolism resonates from nearly every angle.
“Everybody has to find a way to live with what they cannot understand.”
A remarkable achievement in contemporary American fiction, this ambitious National Book Award for Fiction winner may ultimately stand as one of the defining post-9/11 novels despite being set decades before the attacks themselves. While not entirely similar in style, it shares the emotional sprawl of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Underworld in its portrait of the city and its people, while its shifting perspectives and interconnected structure occasionally recall Cloud Atlas. Beautiful, humane, and deeply affecting, it is a novel I already look forward to reading again someday.
“Truth was, the women were victims of the men, always were, always would be.”
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of a Blue Box at the Powerhouse Museum by Maksym Kozlenko.
Garrett Zecker 