Let the Great World Spin
Lots of people talk about working without a net. But no one has ever done so on the scale of Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who spent 45 minutes walking, hopping, and lying on a wire stretched 110 stories up between the World Trade Center towers on Aug. 7, 1974.
Petit鈥檚 act of criminal artistry inspired this year鈥檚 Academy Award-winning documentary, 鈥�Man on Wire.鈥� Now, acclaimed writer Colum McCann (鈥淶oli鈥�) uses 鈥渢he man in the air鈥� as the axis for his gritty yet hopeful new novel Let the Great World Spin.
Today鈥檚 readers cannot think 鈥淲orld Trade Center鈥� without remembering Sept. 11. That tragedy adds an automatic level of poignancy, as McCann harks back to a time when New Yorkers gazed up at the towers in amazement, rather than horror.
Told from multiple points of view, McCann, who lives in New York, performs his own gravity-defying act, swooping from prostitutes to priests, drug-addled artists to grieving mothers as his story unfolds around that morning. Everyone 鈥� from the judge who fined Petit a penny a floor and sentenced him to a children鈥檚 performance in Central Park, to the artist himself, who spent six years training for and planning his audacious feat 鈥� is touched, sometimes in heartbreaking ways, by the performance. And unlike in Yeats鈥檚 poem 鈥淭he Second Coming,鈥� this center holds. McCann has more on his mind than 鈥渕ere anarchy.鈥�
Like Corrigan, an Irish Catholic priest who takes shut-ins to the park and brings coffee to the prostitutes in the Bronx and endures beatings from their pimps, McCann searches for the divine in some of the grimmer corners of New York.
鈥淲hat Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth 鈥� the filth, the war, the poverty 鈥� was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn鈥檛 interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven.... Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.鈥�
That little glow lights the novel as it looks at the fates of Corrigan and his more earthbound brother; two heroin-addicted prostitutes who are mother and daughter; a support group of mothers who have lost their sons in Vietnam; a Guatemalan nurse who is in love with Corrigan; and the daughter of one of the prostitutes. And there is Petit (or at least a fictionalized version of him), reminding himself and readers that 鈥淣obody falls halfway.鈥�
Practicing in a cabin in the Rockies, 鈥淗e tuned himself to the wind. He listened not just for the gust, but for the anticipation of the gust. It was all down to whispers, suggestions. He would use the very moisture in his eyes to test for it. Here it comes.鈥�
For Petit, 鈥渢he core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air.鈥�
But if this is clear to Petit (and McCann), not all the characters see the beauty inherent in his feat. For Claire, a Park Avenue heiress whose brilliant son died in Vietnam while writing computer codes that could track the dead, a man dancing a quarter of a mile in the air was nothing short of an insult.
鈥淒eath by performance? That鈥檚 what it amounted to. So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. How dare he do that with his own body? Throwing his life in everyone鈥檚 face. Making her own son鈥檚 so cheap?鈥�
In terms of sheer lyricism, McCann pulls out all the stops. My review copy was an absolute mess of Post-its and marked passages by the time I was halfway through 鈥淟et the Great World Spin.鈥� He mixes passages of great beauty with the profane heartbreak of a grief-stricken mother, who, in jail, reflects on her powerlessness to protect her daughter from poverty, prostitution, and her own addictions.
Unlike writers of the Doctorow school, McCann isn鈥檛 out to impress readers with the sheer volume of his research or his ability to re-create precise details. (A red 鈥�Sesame Street鈥� Muppet, for instance, wasn鈥檛 called Elmo until 1985. But so what?)
What he鈥檚 after is more evocative. As a boy, Corrigan tells his brother he would rather die with his heart on his sleeve than become a closed-off cynic. So would this novel.
鈥淲e stumble on ... bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.鈥�
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor. She blogs at .
