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    Let the Great World Spin
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    Let the Great World Spin
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    Let the Great World Spin
    Audiobook15 hours

    Let the Great World Spin

    Written by Colum McCann

    Narrated by A Full Cast

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2009
    ISBN9781440774102
    Unavailable
    Let the Great World Spin
    Author

    Colum McCann

    Colum McCann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories and two works of non-fiction. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honours, including the U.S National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the President and co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4. He is the Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence in Hunter College, in New York, where he lives with his wife Allison and their family. His most recent novel, Apeirogon, became an immediate New York Times bestseller and won several major international awards. His first major non-fiction book, American Mother, will be published in February 2024. www.colummccann.com

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    Reviews for Let the Great World Spin

    4/5

    140 ratings138 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I'm completely enamored of this book. Been a Colum McCann fan for a while. He is truly great.
      What I love the most about McCann is the sympathetic, loving voice with which he writes all of his characters. He is completely without judgment and, in reading him, we learn to view the world through his eyes. This, I think, is the greatest and most important role of art, no?
      From an aesthetic standpoint, McCann writes in a beautiful, lilting prose, capturing several different voices in this novel (including a very Joycean chapter) and making them all believable.
      I was sad when this book was finished! I wanted it to continue for ever.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the idea and the interconnectedness of the characters...but there was just something about it that I didn't love. Thus the 3-star rating.
    • 5/5
      As I opened this book a few nights ago, my wife (who really liked it) said, "There isn't really closure in this novel", speaking of the stories of each character. But in a subtle way, there is a great deal of closure as the final section seems to me to offer a hopeful flowering of many of the relationships which evolve throughout the novel. This is also an epic poem about interconnectedness, loss, hope and love. The opening sections deal with death, addiction and despair, and the novel returns to these, but it ends as a hopeful elegy.
    • 5/5
      Perhaps THE best book I've read in the past year. A number of stories intertwine in August of 1974, playing off Philippe Petit's famous outlaw wirewalk on a cable stretched between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The important theme of this book is not that things end, but that things go on. Maybe our lives are like threads a couple of feet long twined into a much longer rope, tied to a chain, attached to a 250-foot length of 450 lb. cable, enabling a stunt that immortalizes a man, a structure, a city, a civilization. Sometimes when we think that our story is over, it turns out it's only a prelude of a much larger story, which itself spins into an even larger one. Maybe in that context, we're all immortal. McCann's mastery of the different characters' unique voices is impeccable. I particularly loved the part centering on Tillie, the Bronx hooker, and the descriptions of Petit's preparations for his magnificent stunt. But all the characters, however high or low in the social strata, or however exasperating, are understandable and even lovable when you see the world through their eyes.
    • 4/5
      I usually don't like short stories because I end up wanting to know more and feeling like I'm being cheated. This was a wonderful exception because of the way the stories all revolve around each other and sort of interconnect without each one knowing, and it was just enough.

      I liked Tillie's chapter best. This is one of her quotes: "When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, Eve I'm leaving you, honey, and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker."

      How can you not love that.
    • 4/5
      I never would have picked up this book if it had not been a book club selection. And I certainly wouldn't have finished it! The book is made up of a series of interconnected chapters, all connected to the man who walked between the two towers. I thoroughly disliked the first chapter (which was quite long!) but once I got past that story I really enjoyed the book.
    • 3/5
      After all the hype, this wasn't as amazing as I expected, but it was still quite good. McCann seems to write particularly well from the point of view of women, and many of the chapters were very strong on their own (Adelita's after the crash ... gorgeous). The overall effect, however, wasn't as much of a crescendo as I'd hoped. For a more powerful novel-in-stories type read, try OLIVE KITTERIDGE.
    • 4/5
      A great book. At first glance it seems like a collection of unrelated stories centered around a certain time period, but as the book progresses, connections emerge. As we learn more about the characters and their connections to each other, we gain a deeper understanding of each character and what drives them.

      Let the Great World Spin is an engrossing and inspiring novel.
    • 4/5

      This is really more like a 4 1/2 star novel. Colum McCann took a true historical event with Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in NYC on August 7, 1974 and built characters around this all connected by this one event but seemingly unrelated to the actual man who did it. At first also, the characters seem unrelated to eachother but McCann is really adept at connecting them and helping you see a variety of perspectives, sometimes on the same topic or event because of this writing device. In many ways, however, these chapters could function as their own stand alone stories or vignettes about this event, too, which makes them really interesting.

      I have to admit, some of these characters really got to me, especially the Irish priest who leaves Ireland at a long age to help out a bunch of NYC prostitutes. There's a curious and acute cross cultural sort of awareness going on here that sets this novel apart from many others and they each have their own distinctive voice when the narration switches to them across the chapters. It's amazing so many different people could meet and be so tied to one event but then again, it's NYC and that sort of thing seems like it happens all of the time.


      pg. 29-30 "It's about fear. You know? They're all throbbing with fear. We all are...Bits of it floating in the air," he said, "It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, bit it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it's so fine you don't notice it. But you're covered in it. It's everywhere. What I mean is, we're afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and our tongues. If we stopped to take account of it, we'd just fall into despair. But we can't stop. We've got to keep going."


      pg. 32 "I fooled myself into thinking I'd some poems in me while I was in Dublin. It was like hanging old clothes out to dry. Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the bombers who'd treated us us to their afternoon of delight."

      pg. 68 "Perhaps its chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to convince ourselves that we are valuable."

      pg. 72 "The doctor came in, clipboard to his chest. He spoke quietly, of internal injuries. A whole new language of trauma."

      pg. 76 "We find, as in old jewelery, the gone days of our lives."

      ...

      "She felt like her mouth was made of chalk. Almost swallowed it as she spoke. Like an apology."

      pg. 85 "The first star in the morning is the last one at night."

      pg. 115 "Being inside the car, when it clipped the back of the van, was like being in a body we didn't know. The picture we refuse to see of ourselves. That is not me, that must be somebody else."

      pg. 128 "She usually wore her weariness like an autograph..."

      pg. 230 "At the end of the world they're going to have cockroaches and Barry Manilow records."

      pg. 333 "Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise."




    • 4/5
      In 1974, Philippe Petit walked out between the towers of the World Trade Center with nothing to keep him from falling but the cable beneath his feet. He ran, danced, and even lay down on the wire. He was up there for 45 minutes. And the world watched, holding its breath.

      Colum McCann highlights Petit's famous stunt in his latest novel Let the Great World Spin. In the shadow of the tightrope walker, various lives intersect in the streets of New York City. They include an artist strung out on cocaine, an Irish missionary, a slew of prostitutes, a grieving Park Avenue mother, among others. Moving back and forth from one character's first-person perspective to another's, McCann effectively nails each voice making up for any confusion the frequent switching causes. With such a great cast and strong voice, it is unfortunate that the novel is split between so many characters, leaving each sorely undeveloped. These characters deserve a full-length novel of their own.

      Overall, the story is written well, although some of the subplots have little to do with the main story. In the end, I was left scratching my scalp wondering why McCann felt the need to include certain characters (i.e. the grafitti photographer, the California programmers). I kept hoping for a punch which tied them all together, but was left with none.

      From this one work, I can tell that McCann is a great storyteller and master of creating an interesting character. If one can look past the thin wire holding these stories together, and focus instead on the artist dancing on the line, then one should be able to find enjoyment in Let the Great World Spin.
    • 5/5
      I usually don't like it when authors switch perspectives from chapter to chapter and tie a lot of different stories together, but Colum McCann does this so expertly in this book that I just couldn't help but love it. Truly amazing read.
    • 5/5
      With such mixed reviews, I was a little reluctant to pick this book up, but so glad I did. It is now one of my new favorites (of all times). I think I just resonated with McCann's writing style and journey into the hearts and minds of characters probably very unlike himself. I don't think it always succeeds, I mean, sometimes I felt like he was guessing about things (life as a prostitute in 1973, for instance). But that said, he handles his characters with such reverence and respect, it was hard not to like the way he did it. I loved the author's choices on surprising compositions of his characters, like the obese African-American woman Gloria, who loves opera at the Met, and much to her chagrin, time and time again everyone assumes she is a "Southern church lady" (she is no fan of the church); or Corrigan, who everyone first assumes in a strung out Irish drunk, but in fact, is a struggling monk and helper to all people. It is these unlikely insights into humanity that makes this novel such a joy to read. Time and time again, despite struggle, there are little glimpses of what makes us all shine, and this world a beautiful place. So even amidst death and war (Vietnam), there is hope. But mostly, I just sank deeply into the world McCann created through these very different characters, and a time and place I just only vaguely remember (I was a small kid then); and I loved the structure, loosely linked stories, and how the characters came together in small but important ways. This is my favorite novel in a long time. Maybe not for everyone, but I sure loved it and highly recommend it.
    • 3/5
      I should probably swear off of award winning books, at least lately. And I'm going to have to start skipping book club when they choose to read an award winner although in all fairness, this particular book was chosen long ago and I could never find the impetus to finish it until recently. Suffice it to say it's never a good sign when books take up extended residence on my bedside table. Although this National Book Award winner by Colum McCann is well written, this collection of inter-related stories tenuously connected by the spectacular 1974 Philippe Petit tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center left me unsatisfied.The short stories focus on one day in the lives of very disparate characters. There's a Park Avenue matron hosting a meeting for her grief support group for mothers who lost sons in Vietnam, a celibate Irish monk living and working amongst the poor and drug addicted, the monk's brother, mother and daughter prostitutes, the judge who will preside over Philippe Petit's trial, and a counter-culture artist and his wife. The stories visit the characters on the day of the tightrope walk but also fills in each person's personal back history as well. Even so, some of the characters feel incomplete and one dimensional. Characters drive the slowly unfolding novel rather than the singular event that threads through each of the narratives. And as is often the case in purely character driven novels, the characters are incredibly introspective, perhaps too much so in the cases when their actions already telegraph their thoughts. In the end, the actual tightrope walk, although a true event, became inconsequential and simply a narrative technique to tie these people together in ways that end up being far closer than the reader first suspects. It took me a very long time to slog through the book because I just didn't really engage with any of the characters. McCann's writing may be techniquely well done but there was a cold, flat distance to it that held this reader at a remove. We might be on the ground looking up at the magic happening high above us in the air but we're too far away to actually feel any of the magic.
    • 3/5
      In 1974, a singular event—Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center—is the intersecting point in the lives of disparate characters, each of whose stories becomes the focus of a separate chapter in this fine novel. A judge, a prostitute, an Irish monk and his brother, grieving mothers who have lost their sons in Vietnam, a young urban photographer, immigrants and Californian computer hackers. The walking man becomes their touchstone, their point of departure, and sometimes their destination. And as their lives separately unfold they also fold back in on each other perhaps stitched together by the trace of that performance that touched them all.McCann’s poetic prose displays a genuine and loving appreciation for each of his central characters, capturing their voice with varying degrees of success. Or perhaps that perception of success will be due more to the reader. For me, the chapter from the point of view of Claire, the wealthy but bereft mother of Joshua, who was called up to count deaths in Vietnam by joining an elite group of computer programmers, is a marvel. With an obvious nod to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, McCann entirely enters the pathos of Claire’s grief-filled world. The other central characters seem less certain to me, sometimes rescued from cliché by anxious novelty. Always readable, but not always gripping.A coda set in 2006 ensures that the novel encircles its unspoken spectre—the catastrophic loss of the twin towers twenty-seven years after Petit’s remarkable achievement, that walk which in its insouciance and innocence, perhaps, brought lives together in a way just as momentous though less scarring than that later catastrophe. The great world continues to spin. Some lives ended on that day in 1974, but traces continue in the lives of others. McCann suggests there is something hopeful in that. And I agree. Certainly worth a read.
    • 3/5
      Didn't live up to the hype for me.
    • 1/5
      couldnt finish it too depressing
    • 3/5
      Very well written and with a great sense of character and place and yet it gives me some problems. The books purports to be a slice of New York life in 1974 loosely connected by Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center Towers. But while the passages about Petit are among some of the most lyrical and beautiful in the book the connection seems contrived and of little relevance to what is happening in the rest of the book. Most of stories in the book center around or are connected to a group of black hookers in the Bronx. They are suitably depressing. Even a story of high society is concerned with the death of a son in Vietnam. I didn't arrive in New York City until a decade later and there were still seedy areas, Alphabet City and pre-Disney Times Square to name but two. But there was a vivacity about it all that seems lacking in the book. Joe Papp was dominating Off-Broadway, A Chorus Line was a year from opening, Ellen Stewart had founded La Mama and Miguel Algarin the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. In Music CBGBs was founded in 1973 , the Ramones kicked off in 1974.There was a lot happening in NYC in 1974. There was a lot of life. Unfortunately not much of it appears in this book.
    • 3/5
      Let the Great World Spin is a story about several characters, all linked to one or more of the others. I found some stories quite engaging, but there were also stories which did not grip me at all. I don't know if it's thw writing style of these parts or if it's just a personal thing though. I would recommend trying this book if its description appeals to you, because it may be worth it for you.
    • 5/5
      Yes," the characters did seem to walk off the page" as another reviewer wrote. I thoroughly enjoyed the interlocking stories and the beautiful writing. I've resolved to read more of his books.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written, characters seemed real enough to walk off the page. Aren't we all walking a tightrope? Loose ends to remind reader that not all neatly ties in literature or in life. Best read in 2012!
    • 3/5
      Framed by Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers, this series of linked stories centers on characters who are all troubled or searching for something. I’m not really sure how to describe them. I went up and down with this one. At the beginning I was really enjoying it, then I got bogged down for a while, then would pick back up. I found that I enjoyed it more at the beginning before the stories started collapsing on themselves and becoming more connected. In the end, I liked it, the writing was beautiful, but I can’t say that I loved it.
    • 4/5
      This book explores the lives of several people in New York City, centering around the events on the day in 1974 when a tightrope walker walked between the Twin Towers.It was an enjoyable read, but I found it to be a fairly trite slice-of-NYC-life novel. It explores how everyone from a rich Park Avenue housewife to an Irish monk to black prostitutes are intimately connected in NYC. It also explores how one small event can effect several people's lives, not just for a day, but for an entire lifetime. These themes are interesting, but I don't think McCann does anything unusual or new with them.The book is emotionally grueling: in contrast with the elation of the tightrope walker's journey, all of the characters experience painful grief and hardship. The few moments of happiness in the book are a very wistful, painful happiness.McCann does a wonderful job of evoking NYC in the 1970s: definitely a rough and ragged time in New York's history.I'm not sure why my reaction to this book is so lukewarm when most other reviewers gush over it's power. The characters are all very vivid and real, their stories are interesting, but mostly I don't find anything very original in the book. Maybe the few years that I lived in NYC have given me a New Yorker's ability to blandly walk past spectacles that tourists find riveting.I listened to the audiobook, which was wonderful. A different actor narrates each character, and each actor was superb in his or her role.
    • 4/5
      A cluster of related narratives, all intersecting in New York City on the August day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked between the towers. Told in a number of different first-person voices, all free with profanity. (Hey, what do want? It's New York.) Captures a time in the city's life and the complex way individual stories make up the big story. The descriptive language sometimes gets in the way of the reader's understanding, other times enhances it. Not a compelling read, because the stories have so many unrelated aspects. Fascinating sketches, though: never too much about any one character.
    • 3/5
      It Spins. It Sputters. It Stops Just Short of Great."The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before." (p. 7)The watchers in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin are New Yorkers, heads turned heavenward, eyes fixed on Philippe Petit as he eases out onto a wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Crazy man? Lunatic? Jokester? Will he jump? Or fall? No one knows. And as everyone wonders, the city holds its collective breath, watches and waits.It is the mid 1970s. The Twin Towers are a marvel in themselves. Nearly a quarter of a mile high, they were the tallest buildings in the world from '71 to '73. No one would have guessed the fate that awaited thirty years down the road.McCann uses Petit's high wire act as the thread that weaves through this collection of linked stories. Petit remains, simply, an unnamed aerialist so dedicated to his exquisite art form that he needs little else to thrive. His grace and control are balletic. His body is a supple, sinewy extension of his beautiful imagination. He is an enigmatic and fascinating character.McCann spends far too little time on Petit and far too much time on characters like Corrigan and his narrator brother, Ciaran, two young Irishman trying to make a difference to the down and outers who work the streets of New York and live off them as well. Corrigan's martyrdom is tiresome. Ciaran seems to be an appendage, there to narrate and nothing more. At some point, I began to feel bogged down by their shared history.There are other players; a mother who grieves for the son killed in Viet Nam, her husband, the judge who gets the case involving the wire walker, Tillie, a suicidal hooker who worked the streets with her seventeen year-old-daughter, a group of California computer geeks patched into a payphone on the street below the towers, and in 2006, Tillie's granddaughter Jaslyn, who finds a photo of the man on the tightrope and reflects on what things might have been like decades before.As much as I wanted to, I never fully dropped into the "Great World" of this story. Some of the stories spin. Others sputter. Several tie together. A few characters come on stage briefly, then disappear; the computer geeks, the graffiti photographer, feeling more like asides that could have been edited out. McCann fully inhabits his characters, giving each a distinctive voice. I especially enjoyed Tillie's tragic voice and Jude Soderberg's unsentimental view of the justice system and the people, losers and lovers and everyone in between, who pass through its endlessly revolving door. McCann transitions smoothly between first and third person, though some passages get a little sing-songy with the word play and are awkward and over-stylized. The ending feels tacked on. The novel works well as a whole, though I never stopped feeling these were short-stories. Not a bad thing, just something I was conscious of.
    • 4/5
      A Tribe Called Quest told us that there are, "Eight million stories in the city, it's a pity." Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin" limits itself to just a handful of these: the upper-class wife of a judge who has lost a son in Vietnam, two black prostitutes who work under the Deegan expressway, an Irish immigrant struggling with his faith, and a few others. McCann ties them all together with Phillip Petit's death-defying tightrope walk between the Wold Trade Center towers. Connections are made, epiphanies reached, or not, and the great world continues to spin. Ah, literature! But that's sort of the problem. If this sounds to you like the structure of a tediously earnest, not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is, Oscar-bait, faux-arthouse message movie, well, you're not the only one. At least Sandra Bullock wasn't involed in the production of "Let the Great World Spin," which is more than can be said for "Crash." "Let the Great World Spin" can be profound and literary to a fault. There were times that I felt that McCann was writing about the sort of themes writers are supposed to write about and cherry-picking characters that were just too typically seventies-New York to take entirely seriously. I was sort of surprised that somebody didn't end up at Studio 54, or that the novel didn't end with a long, slow pan over the skyline. I'm similarly ambivalent about McCann's prose, which shows real polish and sophistication, yet sometimes gets bogged down in its own attempts at meaningful transcendence. Too often I felt I knew where he was going with an image or character before he arrived there, and this might not be a wholly admirable quality. Still, McCann's novel, which, after all, won the National Book Award, has one thing to recommend it: it's genuinely involving, and makes you care about its characters in a way that many other critically lauded books don't. His characters seem complete and alive on the page, and that no mean feat, particularly at a time when so many readers seem to be complaining that you find more likeable, and more believable, characters in narrative non-fiction than in contemporary novels. Some of McCann's creations, like Tillie, a street hooker whose daughter has also joined his profession but whose personality hides depths that few would guess at, are likely to stay with me for a long time. McCann's plot, it has to be said, also took me places I didn't quite forsee. Readers should be warned that there are no formulaic happy endings to be had here. All things considered, that's more than good enough for three-and-a-half stars.
    • 5/5
      I became engrossed in this book. Multiple stories are told by different characters all surrounding the tightrope walk of Philippe Petit in the 1970s. Each character and their story are connected in ways that illuminated the struggles of the time as well as the human condition itself. A beautifully written novel that I believe anyone would gain something out of.
    • 4/5
      McCann is one of the best writers I have read in a while. His ability to intricately weave the lives of the different characters together in obscure encounters is fascinating. He also has a knack for helping you see the setting as in, " This was a hospital that looked like it needed a hospital." Very enjoyable and I look forward to our book discussion on January 9.
    • 3/5
      The world spins and our lives go on. Each of these lives is made up of words and stories that intersect with each other. The stories overlap and connections are made and broken. This novel takes up these notions and, adding a focal point with the event and wonder at the achievement of a mysterious tightrope walker in August, 1974, tells the stories of some lives of people in New York City whose world like ours was spinning. “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.” (p 349) I was impressed with this novel filled with calamities and disorder, people from judges to prostitutes, the high and the low -- McCann was not afraid to portray the underbelly of society, the immigrants (one would not expect less from such a well-traveled Irish writer), and the magic of the funambulist at the center of it all. The disorder begins even before the two Irish brothers whose story opens the novel when one of them is knocked down by an explosion. There will be more disorder before their story ends, but the spinning theme is also the glue that ties the stories and the characters' world together with a sort of structure. The stories include those told by the mother of Corrigan and his brother: "she would launch into a story of her own creation, fables that sent my brother and me to different places, and we would wake in the morning wondering if we had dreamed different parts of the same dream, or if we had duplicated each other, or if in some strange world our dreams had overlapped . . . We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's chance."(p 68) Yes, chance plays a role in the novel. But the intersection of lives also evokes the era, one centered on that famous tightrope walk between the twin towers. This era, one that was lost in September of 2001, is merely adumbrated in this novel which seems to lose focus at times, and it is story, not plot, driven. I am reminded of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland which also tells a story of post-2001 New York City with similarly disparate characters, but a more focused plot. The overall effect of McCann's narrative is one that seems fitting to New York City (although there are many other stories of the city that are not included here) and the new milennium. Each reader will have to decide for himself what the stories mean.
    • 5/5
      This book has just placed itself in my Top Ten list. It is brilliantly written, telling the loosely interconnected stories of disparate New Yorkers tied together by the real-life tightrope walk of Phillippe Petit between the World Trade Center Towers in 1974. The characters jump off the pages. The events of the day are told through very clever vehicles, especially the description of the actual tightrope walk. The modern melting pot of New York is real and tangible. So well put together. I need not say more. It certainly deserved the Nation Book Award and more.
    • 4/5
      Brief Description: This is not an easy book to summarize. The basic idea is that, on August 4, 1974, a tightrope artist named Phillippe Petit illicitly walked across a wire stretched between the towers of the World Trade Centers in New York City. (This really happened by the way.) All around the city, people were buzzing about what Petit was doing. Using this unusual event as the backdrop for the book, McCann weaves together a series of stories involving a priest and his brother, a pair of mother/daughter prostitutes, a young artist and his wife, the judge who hears Petit’s case and his wife, and a group of mothers who have lost their sons in Vietnam. Like Petit in the book, McCann is performing a high wire act of his own—attempting to balance multiple stories on what begins to feel like a razor-thin wire.My Thoughts: This book is an example of a new type of sub-genre that C.B. James recently discussed in his review of Ivan and Mischa: books told via “a series of interconnected short stories.” (Other examples of this sub-genre include A Visit from the Goon Squad and Olive Kitteridge.) However, unlike A Visit from the Goon Squad—which felt fresh and exciting and new (if not a little confusing)—I thought this book wasn’t well served by the interlinked stories style. First of all, the first story involving the priest John Corrigan felt way too long. We spend so much time getting to know him, that when McCann shifts to another story, it was very jarring and abrupt. Plus, it takes quite some time for all the stories to come together and intersect—almost until the last third of the book. Finally, I thought McCann overdid it on the interconnections between the characters. By having seemingly EVERYONE in the book end of up being connected in some way, it made New York City seem like a small town where everyone knows everyone else. This felt so unrealistic to me, and I just couldn’t buy into the story. So although I recognize what he was trying to do with this book, I think that (unlike Phillippe Petit) McCann stumbles and falls. Still, it was an interesting read, and I’m glad I gave it a try.