Let the Great World Spin – Jacqlyn Schott

Colum McCann. New York: Random House, 2009. 368 pp.

“The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium. He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake” (McCann 164).

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, was published in 2009 by Random House; one would never know that this novel was not published directly after the 9/11 tragedy, for the 1974 New York world that McCann creates, along with his characters, reflect so well the shift of mind that happened both in America and across the globe. The novel centers on the infamous tightrope walk over 110 stories on the Twin Towers by Philippe Petit. Do not mistake this centralizing event as being the focus of the novel, because the true focus of this novel is how people connect even through the most unthinkable of occurrences and situations. That is the true touchstone of the novel and the hub around which each individual story unfolds. “‘Ah, no, they’re good people,’ Corrigan said. ‘They just don’t know what they are doing. Or what’s being done to them. It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are’” (29). Corrigan is one of the first characters introduced in the novel and remains a pillar throughout, a character manifestation of the connection touchstone. Both Corrigan and his brother, Ciaran, struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives surrounded by nothing but tragedy and destitution after they leave their home in Ireland to venture to the United States. From then on, the novel revolves around different characters and their relationships with the brothers and all of their relationships to Petit’s walk across the tightrope. It is through utilizing this one amazing act in history as the connection between seemingly unconnected people that McCann drives the central theme of connection home and how everyone walks some sort of tightrope in their life whether it is a tightrope of love, grief, belonging, or even identity. This event allows readers to glimpse into how a single event can shake and shape a life so profoundly, that nothing remains the same afterwards. One can find this theme of connection and significance throughout literature and even more specifically American literature, for Americans have always been fascinated with the thought of “the new frontier.” Before Petit’s walk, no one ever really paid much attention to the Twin Towers or the role that those towers played in their lives. Petit paved a new frontier by reintroducing the masses to the significance that something can hold and reintroducing people to the idea of risk, of chance, and of flight.

McCann’s skillful moves between his characters and their stories and his masterful hand in utilizing multiple stories to create and spin a whole makes this novel an ideal read for those who also need to be reintroduced and reconnected to life itself. Experienced readers in American fiction will be able to relate and connect this piece of fiction back to the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner and the conceptions of the new frontier; the idea of significant connections is also a key piece in many a work of American fiction. However, it is not just experienced readers who will be able to connect to this piece; it is but any reader who has with yearnings to both escape his/her world and reimagine it. Granted, these readers will need to be ones that can handle some of the more adult themes and concepts that are scattered throughout the novel, but that requirement of comprehension and ability to remember at least eleven different protagonists does not in any way deter from the storyline itself or the message behind the novel. This novel performs a feat much like that of Petit. This novel manages to become a symbol and a beacon for 9/11 literature in how it both touches on the event but does not mention it. Let the Great World Spin is a novel that perfectly shows how the world both lingered and moved on after the event, and that shows how people can connect to one other no matter how tragic an event or how newsworthy. McCann is able to take the reader on a journey to learn why they are where they are, to break down over personal tragedy and the tragedy of others, and then how to pick oneself up again and keep on moving in life in order to keep connecting and so that nothing will be forgotten. In short, Let the Great World Spin is a novel that builds up two wonderful towering themes, destroys them, complicates them, and then rebuilds them into something truly magnificent.