Colum McCann has accomplished a rare feat: he's a foreigner, but he's brought out a more sophisticated, forceful, and American novel about that most fascinating and aggravating of American cities, New York, than almost any American author could. "Let the Great World Spin" sheds its knowing and compassionate light on the lives of a handful of New Yorkers - two women distraught over the loss of sons in Vietnam, the judge husband of one of these women, a drug-addled avant garde artist struggling with heavy guilt, a clique of prostitutes in the South Bronx and the naif who strives to minister to them, the Central American woman who falls for this would-be priest.

The daily struggles with grief, poverty, and hopelessness swirl - spin - around the focal point of an amazing, only-in-New York stunt that was perpetrated on a sultry summer day in 1974: a tightrope walk between the tops of the two World Trade Center towers. In fact, this unnamed daredevil's portrait is one of the most captivating and entertaining parts of the book. It is one of the continuing strands Mr. McCann so skilfully weaves together; they spin and swirl in an ever-tightening whirlpool centered around the nexus of the tightrope stunt. The stunt does not function as a deus ex machina device, although it can seem that way. As in "Five Skies" by Ron Coleman, this one high aspiration, this out-of-this-world concept, carries a symbolic weight. People strive to rise above in this story, and the tightrope walker carries not only their hopes and dreams aloft, but those of millions of other New Yorkers, too.

Mr. McCann's prose works wonders with the internal dialogs here; it contains just the right level of language, slang, insult, street patois, and curse to be expected from each of these characters. His concept is ingenious and his somewhat unorthodox way of twirling the yarns together into a cohesive whole achieves its object brilliantly. This book takes and breaks our hearts, heals them partway back up, and then gives us hope for these characters and for their fellow hopefuls here on the ground. This is the best book I have read this year. I honor Mr. McCann's achievement, and encourage in the highest possible terms, other LT'ers to take it up! Oh, you will be pleased and enriched! ( )

a rather lovely, "Crash" like pastiche of intertwining lives whose connection is deeper than the event they all experience. ( )

Intertwined stories of "ordinary lives" on one day in New York, August 7, 1974. The description of these lives in a time when NYC was in decline are wonderful. ( )

Colum McCann has written a powerful fable that holds your attention and challenges your imagine in ways you wouldn't believe possible.
John A. Corrigan, aka Corrie, and his brother Ciaran are transplanted Dubliners living in the Bronx, Where Corrie, a member of a Catholic religious order, ministers to the needs of the prostitutes patrolling the underpass on the Major Deegan Expressway. He brings them coffee on cold nights, and lets them use the bathroom in his nearby apartment. He is, as one of them describes him, "like a Motown whitey."
Corrie also assists with elderly patients at a local nursing home, and he is attracted to a nurse named Adelita, who clearly loves him. The direction of the story seems predictable enough, until tragedy strikes. McCann takes his readers through a wrenching series of plot twists and turns, and draws in seemingly disparate cast of characters, including a group of women who meet to remember their sons who died in Vietnam; a judge; a high-school boy who photographs graffiti in the subway, and a pair of hippie artists with a direct connection to the tragedy that derails six lives. They are tied together by a tightrope walker who strings his line between the still vacant Twin Towers and puts on an inspiring show on a summer morning.
The tightrope walker is loosely based on Philippe Petit, who performed his feat on August 7, 1974, but McCann is careful not identify his aerialist directly with Petit. Instead, he allows the reader to get into the mind of the performer, and see the event through his experiences.
Ultimately, a generation must pass before the events of that day coalesce to fulfill Corrie's ironic prediction about the world: "Someday the meek might actually want it." ( )

I received an ARC through LT early this summer, but I just got around to picking this up. This isn't a book full of big ideas, but instead a book full of small truths. It tells a set of linked stories about disparate characters and how their lives intersect.
The book opens with a man walking across a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in August 1974. The stories that follow are loosely linked by this event, and the characters are linked themselves by the events of that day and all their repercussions. The writing is wonderful, and every character offers an original, thoughtful perspective on the events surrounding the day. McCann writes with great emotional truth. Highly recommended. ( )