Fiction review: Let the Great World Spin

FICTION

Colum McCann's powerful new novel, "Let the Great World Spin," opens with a moment of lofty magic. It's Aug. 7, 1974, and a man seems to float in the air a quarter mile above lower Manhattan. He is, in fact, standing on a wire stretched between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. And as he begins walking between the towers, pedestrians below him find themselves mesmerized.

"Around the watchers, the city still made its everyday noises," McCann writes. "But the watchers could have taken all the sounds and smashed them down into a single noise and still they wouldn't have heard much at all: even when they cursed, it was done quietly, reverently."

It's a beautiful, heady opening, but McCann soon plunges his readers to Earth, landing first among prostitutes and street thugs in the Bronx projects. McCann occasionally returns to the tightrope walker, whose performance weaves the novel's disparate stories together. But he rarely lifts us high above a city that seems to be falling short of its residents' brightest hopes.

Among McCann's earthbound characters are:

• An Irish monk named Corrigan who lives in the Bronx and leaves his apartment unlocked so neighborhood prostitutes can take respite from the heat. He embraces suffering and self-denial, but he harbors a secret: He's in love, and he is struggling with his vow of celibacy.

• A housewife living in a Park Avenue penthouse -- one of the few characters who seems, at first glance, to live above the city's problems. "Up there," a woman in a less privileged group says disdainfully of the Upper East Side perch. "As if it were somewhere to climb. As if they would have to ascend to it." But the woman's son has been killed in the Vietnam War, and for emotional support she reaches out to a group of women whose families also have suffered losses in the war. (In a tidy piece of interwoven storytelling, her husband is the judge who passes sentence on the tightrope walker after his arrest.)

• Two young, married artists whose 1927 Pontiac Landau plays a critical role in a car accident on the FDR Drive. (As one character memorably describes it, it's "a gold vehicle going about its everyday applause of itself.") After spending the past year living in a cabin in upstate New York without electricity, the two have returned to Manhattan to discover that the art world has moved past them.

Granted, it's a depressing cast of characters. Among the few who seem to be enjoying themselves are some computer programmers in California who randomly call pay phones in lower Manhattan, looking for eyewitnesses willing to describe the tightrope walker's progress.

But as worn down as McCann's characters are, they each struggle heroically against life's downward pull, and that's what makes the novel so powerfully uplifting, despite its sadness.

As one character says, "The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.