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A review by cocoonofbooks
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
4.0
I went into this with low expectations — it was chosen as our university's annual campus read, and the colleagues who'd read it said they didn't like it very much. I also don't generally like short stories collections, and I thought at first this was one, but then you realize that all of the characters are connected in one way or another. It's kind of like Olive Kitteridge, except that the person at the center of this story is real-life high-wire artist Philippe Petit, whose August 1974 walk between the Twin Towers is largely peripheral to the main characters' lives but nonetheless presents a focal point around which many people's stories are woven.
The writing was beautiful and sucked me in quickly, particularly once I got to the second chapter. This is a book that celebrates the feeling of small moments in a way that is not dull but bursting with true life. As the book progresses we see how each character's individual thread is connected to all the others, sometimes in very small ways — the computer hackers in California who call a New York payphone to get someone to describe the tightrope walker — to the very large, with love and death and parenthood and friendship all playing roles. Some aspects stretch credulity, but for the most point the characters feel real, even though some are presented in first-person narration and some in third-person.
As a daily reader of Writing with Color, I couldn't help but feel a little uncomfortable that McCann felt it necessary to focus so much attention on the sex workers who made up most of the characters of color in this book. There's also a black woman whose story focuses a lot on her poverty and her experiences of racism. As WWC would say, these are important stories to tell, but those that focus disproportionately on the suffering of people of color should really stay within the purview of writers of color. With all the diversity of lives that McCann conjures within these pages, it's unclear why it's only in the last chapter, when we jump to 2006, that we get a character of color whose story isn't primarily about their suffering.
On the whole, I found this an enjoyable read. I'm undecided whether I liked it enough to go see the author speak when he comes to campus, but I'm glad to have read it regardless, and I look forward to discussing it with my colleagues who also read it.
The writing was beautiful and sucked me in quickly, particularly once I got to the second chapter. This is a book that celebrates the feeling of small moments in a way that is not dull but bursting with true life. As the book progresses we see how each character's individual thread is connected to all the others, sometimes in very small ways — the computer hackers in California who call a New York payphone to get someone to describe the tightrope walker — to the very large, with love and death and parenthood and friendship all playing roles. Some aspects stretch credulity, but for the most point the characters feel real, even though some are presented in first-person narration and some in third-person.
As a daily reader of Writing with Color, I couldn't help but feel a little uncomfortable that McCann felt it necessary to focus so much attention on the sex workers who made up most of the characters of color in this book. There's also a black woman whose story focuses a lot on her poverty and her experiences of racism. As WWC would say, these are important stories to tell, but those that focus disproportionately on the suffering of people of color should really stay within the purview of writers of color. With all the diversity of lives that McCann conjures within these pages, it's unclear why it's only in the last chapter, when we jump to 2006, that we get a character of color whose story isn't primarily about their suffering.
On the whole, I found this an enjoyable read. I'm undecided whether I liked it enough to go see the author speak when he comes to campus, but I'm glad to have read it regardless, and I look forward to discussing it with my colleagues who also read it.