Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

For the past three years in Portland I have enjoyed participating in my community library’s “One Book, Everybody Reads” program.  I’ve read some varied and interesting books this way, plus I find it a fun community event.  This year our library chose the National Book Award Winner (2009) Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.  Set in New York City in 1974 the novel uses the historic and now iconic event of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as the unifying narrative spine upon which the nerves of many different characters connect.  Yet, the novel is not about Petit’s walk (if you are interested in that I recommend the amazing documentary Man on a Wire which you can get streaming from Netflix).  Rather, the book is about an array of ‘normal’ people such as a prostitute in the Bronx, a grieving mother on Park Ave., or a radical Catholic monk serving in the inner city.  McCann’s genius is in creating characters that capture the imagination and tap into the tension of the unique individual soul amidst that vast impersonal city.  In the end we are all connected.  

Sometimes I drive through the streets of Chicago, look up into the immense buildings filled with people towering above me, and wonder “How does God know all of us?  How does He care?  What stories are contained all in the hundreds of people in that one building?.”  McCann’s novel touches on those same sentiments- how are we all connected?  How do individual lives matter in the masses of the city?  By using the image of a tightrope walker crossing between the World Trade Towers McCann seeks to use “an act of creation that stands in direct defiance to the act of destruction 27 years later” as a means of healing and redemption.

The problem with this novel, though, is that in the end McCann offers little redemption.  He even admits in an interview that “really the ending of this particular book says: There is no end.  There is grief and there is love and they spin together in this human body, which is, in itself, also a book” (364 interview with McCann).   If all there is is grief and love spinning around inside individuals loosely connected on this spinning planet, then where is the hope in that?   This book is praised for “lifting up a handful of souls” or offering us a “masterly chorus of voices”  and these things are true.  The characters are wonderfully rich and interesting and in the end all connected in a quirky and ingenious way.  But the irony is that the very redemption the author is trying to bring, by unifying individual characters around one event of human triumph (the tightrope walk),  he undercuts by too many characters whose chapters end too abruptly.   Part of being made in the image of God is that we not only have a beginning but we have an end.  And while the great world may spin with suffering and tragedy, history has a telos.  It has a purpose.  Our lives have a purpose, and we are all interconnected to one another moving toward that great day of redemption when all things will be restored.