French=Style; Italian=Food (or Love); Irish=Gift of Gab

I could read, listening in my head, Colum McCann forever. The book club selected Let the Great World Spin for its selection for March and because I was not sure I would like the February book, I dove into LTGWS. Within three pages I was hooked. Different from TC Boyle in that McCann is less ironic, but the lilt, ah the lilt, and the clever puns, and the rhythm. Maybe I should consider books on tape, providing that this one was read by someone with a brogue.

Not sure where this book would fall chronologically with the recent plethora of art (mainly movies, I guess) that are premised on concurrent lives during a given period of time, but this theme is a certain six degrees of separation ... several intertwined lives on the day that Phillipe Petit walked his wire between the two World Trade Centers. That selection of a day in the life itself sets the tone. The book club read Don DeLillo's Falling Man a while back and it garnered tepid comments; I felt it was strained and used 9/11 unnecessarily to set a more universal upper West Side marital angst. The day Petit waked was magic, hopeful, mythic, a positive memory for more than just New Yorkers.

McCann does a fantastic job in showing how this showmanship/miracle touched people who were simply going about their lives, doing their normal work, as judges, advocates, whores, and how this glitter fell on them but could not really change the course of their lives. The world spun on.

But it's the language and the echoing of parallel similes between characters that resound in the book. The black woman, whose three sons died in Viet Nam, who eventually ends up foster parenting the two orphan girls of the hooker who dies on the Tower walk day, who while walking home from the house of the judge who will preside at Petit's hearing, is described as walking as tentatively as Phillipe himself. Other character's thoughts about how their bodies are feeling resound to PP's hypersensitivity to his movements and coordination.

We have read plenty of books for our group that have flatly and with much strain tried to portray cross ethnic and interracial relationships. McCann pulls it off. He has his ear to the wind of NYC life. Brogues, Brahims, Blacks, Bronx-ites, Central Americans all sound real and as they do every day, manage to converse in the polyglot that is the City.

Here's to McCann, obviously a much deserving National Book award winner. I've already reserved more of his books. He may have started off list this year, but little did I know he was a gap in my literary knowledge I needed to fill.

Second Thoughts: There are a couple other themes in the book that have been knocking around in my skull. In addition to walking, there is the metaphor of the wire, as in everyone gets wired, and Joshua and the boys from California who call public phones near the Towers are meant to predict. The other theme is using one's talents and the personal need for people to love you because of them. Petit focuses his talents as personal physical disciple without co-workers or clients or one-on-one beneficiaries; however, his joyous work reaches more people than any of the other characters. Corrigan also has an internal sole battle with his God but decides to set this work among the most needy and unappreciative. When he is successful with his talents, they are directed towards one person, and with no long lasting effect. It is ironic that the last thing he sees before dying is Petit ... does he realize he shouldn't have measured himself against others, that talents are not meant to be an ordeal but a joy. Solomon likewise battles against his courtroom and only finds respite when Petit breaks the deadly routine. This largest theme of one's place and effect on the Great Spinning World is the idea that remains after the last page.