Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This book was on my to-buy list for so long, that when I actually purchased it I was a little afraid of reading it, since by then it couldn’t possibly fulfill my expectations. I finally picked it up this week at the lake, and I was not disappointed. From the beautiful cover design on the paperback (by one of my favorite children’s book artists, Matteo Pericoli), right through to the heartbreaking end, I loved this book.

I will give one caveat – I was not real keen on the author interview at the end. For me, the book was not a about politics, as much as a perfectly realized interpretation of a moment in time that, in contrast to today, makes a more subtle political statement than McCann does in his interview after. I do not really care about Colum McCann’s political views; and I certainly don’t read his books to hear them. In other words, Colum McCann being “interviewed”, by his friend and collaborator Nathan Englander, took away from my satisfaction at the end of the story. Maybe I should have just finished the story and slept on it, saving the notes at the end for another time.

Ok, so back to the book. If you haven’t heard about it already, Mccann uses the event of Philippe Petit’s walk on the high wire between the World Trade Center towers to tell the story of a large cast of characters. He doesn’t just pluck the characters from the scene beneath the walker — in some cases their involvement in the walk is only incidental. When I first read about the book in the NY Times book review, they noted that the plot is very much like the movie “Crash” in that one event brings all of the people together; but it is a bit different, in that the event is really just a common thread, they don’t necessarily interact with each other. It is a bit six-degrees of separation; two people from different worlds meet, then one of them goes out and is involved with a third, etc.

Through the characters we recall the many tumultuous events of the time: soldiers returned (and not) from Vietnam, the increasing poverty and high crime in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the struggle between classes and the awkwardness that follows someone trying to prove it doesn’t matter. Philippe Petit is also a character in the story, but McCann never calls him by name – he is just the walker – mischievous, bold, and ethereal. He doesn’t walk on that wire, he hops, he dances, he lays down on it. His walk, for a brief moment in time, lifted us all up into the clouds. And, despite what people at the time may have thought, he made those towers beautiful.