Books: Let the Great World Spin

In the weeks and months after author Colum McCann’s father-in-law returned from his harrowing ordeal escaping one of the Twin Towers and finding his way north from the destruction and rubble of the 9/11 attacks, McCann was struck by the sheer volume of personal stories and larger narratives intertwined in the events immediately before, during and after that day.

As he looked for a way he could possibly isolate and do justice to any of those stories to help make sense of the attacks and destruction, it struck him that there were just as many stories unfolding years and decades beforehand that could build a larger, deeper, more profound context illustrating the interconnectedness of lives and how they together collectively become the past that keeps the world spinning ever forward.

Soon after the Twin Towers were completed in the early 1970s, an aerialist named Philippe Petit managed the impossible feat of stringing a tightrope between the tops of the buildings in the dead of night and walking across it one morning, capturing the attention and fascination of every New Yorker on the ground below him. McCann uses this true-life event as the cultural linchpin for anchoring the fictional characters he brings to life in and around 1974, the year of Petit’s iconic stunt.

Each chapter in Let the Great World Spin is a stand-alone short story introducing a character, a friendship, a family, or an event that may be big or small: the childhoods of two Irish brothers who eventually emigrate to America, a woman regretting that she let her daughter follow her into a life of prostitution, a wealthy housewife in a grief support group, two relapsed addicts involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Some stories interact directly. Some characters pass by each other tangentially. Almost every character makes an appearance on the day of Petit’s walk.

Two characters over time establish themselves as the metaphoric twin towers linking all these lives … and when they eventually fall, they bring the lives and stories into an even more intricate orbit.

New York City itself is both a setting and a character driving these narratives through its distinct neighborhoods, segregated socioeconomics and vibrant melting-pot identity. The New Yorkers McCann creates and the lives (and occasional deaths) he guides them through are as disparate as they are fundamentally relatable, and through them—and the moments in history they occupy—he keeps their (and by extension our) worlds living, breathing, halting, progressing, collapsing, and always spinning from the past through the present and toward our collective uncertain future.