About book-reviews: Book Review: Let the Great World Spin and the post-9/11 novel

I.

Colum McCann is from Ireland, but his novel Let the Great World Spin already won the 2009 National Book Award and seems like a contender for the Pulitzer, an award given for a book that deals “preferably with American life.” McCann has ear to the ground in 1974 New York City, capturing the cinematic qualities of city life by chronicling the sights, sounds, smells, people, and conflicts. But it’s not a novel about place, it just has a great sense of place.

It’s a novel about a highwire act, the historical tightrope walk of Philippe Petit between the World Trade Center towers. But that’s just backdrop. McCann then swoops into the lives of a series of characters intertwined by life and by Petit.

In the novel’s coda, Jasyln (whose mom and grandma were both prostitutes and the focus of previous chapters) tells Pino, “I like people who unbalance me.” That’s what McCann does in this novel—he unbalances us through the novel’s structure, which shuffles the chronology of events and people’s lives to create a panorama of contemporary America and it’s issues: race, religion, law, family, war, and art. Each new character delves into a different aspect of America’s diversity and unbalances us a little.

Adelita, a character who falls in love with the Irish monk Corrigan, describes desire this way: “Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Word put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped.” This part of McCann’s genius. He does not allow words to pen down his story, but makes the words chase all of the streams of consciousness.

II.

When Corrigan describes the people he serves, he says, “They just don’t know what it is they’re doing. Or what’s being done to them. It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are.” It’s impossible to write a novel about life in America without touching on this new cornerstone—threat levels, security screenings, and a general fear about our perception in the world and what it could do to us. A fear about what kind of life is still possible in the future. Look at Corrigan’s language:

Bits of it [fear] floating in the air. It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but 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 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.

McCann explores the fears of life on the street, the life of the mother who loses a son in Vietnam, and the fears of lawyers and criminals (he treats them separately). Getting beyond the event of 9/11, post-9/11 America is also a place of fear because of the new, digital economy that has upended an economy and a way of life in many parts of the country. American Rust by Phillip Meyer aptly chronicled what this type of fear looked like in one Pennsylvania town stripped of its plants and industrial identity. The confluence of terror, digitalization, and globalization have left us all a little, well, unbalanced. We walk the tightrope of post-modern life trying to find a way to keep the old ways while adjusting to a new world.

Jonathan Safran Foer used the character of Oskar Schell in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (as well as Oskar’s grandfather) to illustrate the new fears a post-9/11 America must contend with. With Schell, Foer looked at the choice fear seemed to create between isolation and safety and interconnectedness and pain. McCann clearly shows the pains of a connected society in the way that he links these people’s lives. When Claire Soderberg thinks about her son, the narrative gradually shifts into his perspective. McCann shows the way a war experience is shared and not limited by space and time; words confine it in a way that doesn’t reflect the shared reality.

Another post-9/11 novel that effectively addresses fear is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. In it McCarthy creates a world that terrorizes the father who tries to protect his innocent son. It is all of our fears, one that transcends the 2000’s, anyway: how can I help my kids be safe and attain some type of goodness in a world that seems to have fallen apart? It’s why Faulkner said the most base of all things human is to be afraid.

At Tillie’s daughter’s funeral, while Tillie is in handcuffs after having taken the rap for her daughter in the courtroom, the minister puts it this way: “Goodness was more difficult than evil. “Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love.” Here McCann sides with Foer—love is the beautiful and true thing that Oskar Schell searches for, but it’s also what redeems Tillie and brings together the group of moms in this novel that lament lost sons. It’s what drives Corrigan and even the junkie artists. It’s what keeps the father and son going in The Road. It creates the interconnectedness that characterizes our times even in the face of unprecedented evil that has sought to cover us in fear.

So when Lara sees Ciaran at the counter and wants him but knows she can’t have him, she says, “There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.”

III.

As a novel of place, the other novel that critics trip over to place is Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. They like the “lyrical realism” of it, though it leaves me a little cold. McCann would be, I guess, just a realist, though on the book’s jacket Dave Eggers uses words like “life force”, “giddy,” and “dizzy.” There is almost something of Stephen Crane’s naturalism in the style, in the way that McCann catalogues city life, or of Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” (Whitman is mentioned in the novel, as are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim). A quick sample of when Ciaran leaves Corrigan’s apartment: “I ran down the slick steps of the apartment building. Huge swirls of fat graffiti on the walls. The drift of hash smoke. Broken glass on the bottom steps. Smells of piss and puke. Through the courtyard. A man held a pit bull on a training rope. He was teaching it to bite. The dog snapped at his arm: there were huge metal bracelets strapped across the man’s wrists. The snarls rolled across the yard.”

The descriptions of city life are concrete, literal, and largely unfiltered. They are poetic in the way that Whitman’s poems are—full of energy and a rhythm that comes from the sounds being described rather than the descriptions themselves. The world evoked is poetic.

Which is not to say that McCann isn’t poetic in this novel. He has the same capacity for humor and devastation as, say, Lorrie Moore. When Tillie laments, “I shoulda swallowed a pair of handcuffs” to describe the way she feels she doomed her daughter, it’s hard not to think about the way Toni Morrison writes. McCann builds up the person’s story and allows them to make the devastating observation about their own behavior. The earlier quotation from Lara about the fear of love is a perfect example.

IV.

So Let the Great World Spin tackles the issues of our time in a structure and format that reflect the unique nature of our times. It is a great effort by Colum McCann. The question that’s fair to ask is how it stacks up to some of the other novels and writers mentioned: Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, or Joseph O’Neill. I believe the best correlation is actually Jonathan Safran Foer because of the way both authors choose to experiment with structure as a way to tell their stories. In Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated, he especially embodied what McCann described as the limitations of words. There Foer used an interpreter to deconstruct language and re-invent the storytelling. McCann is not so daring, but no less accomplished.

And while McCann shares some themes with McCarthy, the scope is so different that the comparison seems uninvited.

Themes aside, the structure that most resembles Let the Great World Spin is Edward Jones’ Pulitzer winning The Known World. Both are multi-layered, slow-reveal type novels that epitomize Post-Modern subjectivity.