Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The residents of lower Manhattan stand silently, their eyes wide with shock as they look up at the Twin Towers in the early morning light of a late summer morning. A mysterious tightrope walker is racing, jumping, and leaping between the towers in August 1974 while hanging a quarter mile above the ground. In bestselling author Colum McCann’s brilliantly complex portrayal of a city and its people, a number of ordinary lives become remarkable in the streets below.
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
293 used from $0.99
Free shipping
Amazon.com
- Used Book in Good Condition
Allow the Big World The critically renowned author’s most ambitious book to date, Spin is a brilliantly complex image of New York City in the 1970s, capturing its suffering, beauty, mystery, and promise.
Young Irish radical monk Corrigan, who lives among prostitutes in the middle of the flaming Bronx, battles his own demons. In an apartment on Park Avenue, a group of moms come together to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to find out how deeply divided they are even in their grief. A teenage artist witnesses a hit-and-run that sends her own life spiralling out of control.
Alongside her teenage daughter, Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, performs pranks in an effort to not only provide for her family but also to establish her own value. The unforgettable voices of the city’s inhabitants, who were suddenly brought together by optimism, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century,” beautifully weave together these and other seemingly unrelated lives in McCann’s potent allegory.
Let the Great World Spin, a broad-reaching and bold social book, captures the spirit of America at a moment of change, great potential, and, in retrospect, sad innocence. Award-winning author McCann hailed as a “fiercely creative talent,” has produced a magnificently American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel may achieve, confront, and even heal.
In August 1974, a tight-rope walker attempts to balance between the World Trade Center’s twin towers as the book opens. However, the twelve characters have only a tenuous connection to this incident. Some of them witness it as it occurs. Later, others learn about it. A Bronx prostitute who paroles outside the Deegan projects, Ciaran Corrigan, an Irish priest, is where the drama on the ground begins. He differs from other monks in that he doesn’t try to convert the prostitutes and doesn’t preach. Additionally, the pimps for the prostitutes beat him repeatedly. Tillie and Jazzlyn Henderson, a mother-daughter prostitute team, also handle a significant portion of the action.
When Jazzlyn is murdered in a vehicle accident and Gloria offers to accept Jazzlyn’s children, Gloria—a “church lady” who lives in the Deegan projects—becomes a significant character in the narrative.
The novel’s overarching topic is our interconnectedness. Gloria’s three boys perished in Vietnam. She participates in weekly gatherings when mothers who have lost sons alternately organize sessions for support. She meets Clair, the wife of Judge Solomon Soderberg, there. He just so happens to be the magistrate who hears the public endangerment case against the tightrope walker. The most compelling sequences involved Gloria, Clair, and other bereaved mothers. One resides in the Deegan projects, while the other is on Park Avenue.
The other women scoff at Claire when she hosts one of the sessions, but the Deegan mother has more compassion in her little finger. The scenes involving Tillie Henderson, the 39-year-old grandma prostitute, come in second. Prior to the tightrope walker, she is called before Judge Soderberg. She is accidentally disrespectful, and he considers fining her for contempt of court but decides against it because of the several reporters there. The book’s lone humorous passage is this one. Tillie is both amusing and heartbreaking, and her scenarios leap off the page.
