Book 13: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

There's a passage I have marked in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. I read the book in high school, and I can no longer remember what it's about, but the passage has always stuck with me, and when I went to look for it just now, the book opened immediately to the page where I had underlined it:

He would disapprove of Muriel's mother, too. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel's health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave.

I kept thinking  of this passage as I read Let the Great World Spin. I was initially attracted to the novel for two reasons: I adore the title. And Dave I and watched, a few months ago, a documentary called Man on  Wire, about Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who strung a wire and walked between the World Trade Towers in 1974. Petit's walk is the frame story for Let the Great World Spin; the event that ties, sometimes very loosely, all the characters together. The story is told from the point of view of several different characters, and most of the action of the novel takes place on the day of or in the days immediately surrounding Petit's walk. There is Ciaran, recently arrived from Ireland and living with his brother, Corrigan, the monk who befriends prostitutes, Tillie, one of said prostitutes, Claire, the wife of Solomon, the judge in whose courtroom Petit ends up after his arrest. And on and on.

The "main current of poetry that flows through all things" is both literal and figurative here, and more democratic than in Salinger's story; no one escapes its touch; no one is forced to endure life without it. Fragments of poems are sprinkled through the novel. The title, McCann reveals in a note at the end, "comes from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem "Locksley Hall." That in turn was heavily influenced by the 'Mu'allaqat,' or the 'Suspended Poems,' seven long Arabic poems written in the sixth century." The prostitutes quote Rumi. Ciaran arrives in New York with a copy of "Howl" tucked into his bag. And aside from this literal current of poetry, uniting people through time and space, there are the constant attempts to find--or to assign--meaning to life, and, particularly, to life in a dark, chaotic time and place. Through painting, photography, filmmaking, technology, through, of course, the tightrope walk itself.

Is all this interconnectedness significant or coincidence? Is the meaning, the beauty we find in life real or imagined? And can it sustain us in the face of everything that goes wrong? These are the questions the book grapples with; after all "at a certain stage," muses one character, "every single thing can be a sign." Is that what's going on? Are the characters (and by extension the reader) grasping at straws, trying desperately to assign meaning to things that have none, in a world where nothing really makes sense? And, maybe McCann is also asking, does it really matter, ultimately, which it is? Let the Great World Spin is dark in places, certainly, and heartbreaking (another label request: "Warning: mothers with dead sons"), but it is never cynical and never hopeless. One character carries a photo of Petit on his wire: "It strikes her as an enduring moment, the man alone against scale, still capable of myth in the face of all other evidence."