Let the Great World Spin

Completely smitten with this book, this author. This after complaining on my blog and to everyone else back in December about how I could not possibly get into Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. I'm pretty sure I was calling it the poor man's Mrs. Dalloway. Eek. Retracting that statement here, especially after realizing halfway through that he IS playing marvelously on Mrs. Dalloway (her airplane morphs into his tightrope walker. Clarissa becomes the American Claire here. And I don't think its a stretch to say that Corrigan parallels Septimus). Mrs. Dalloway, for me, has always been about noticing beauty in the ordinary, amid grief and war and alienation. So, too, with McCann's novel. I was so jaded by the bleakness of the first few chapters - lives marred by drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and war - that I closed the book on them. Thankfully I picked it back up (not one to let the book club down) and discovered that all of these characters' lives intertwine in sometimes tragic, sometimes beautiful ways. The central action of the novel is based on a true incident: in August 1974, Philipe Petit walked a tightrope wire between the World Trade Centers. McCann re-imagines this day, and how the tightrope walker's act of genius and bravado rippled through Manhattan and beyond. What a gorgeous metaphor, really: suddenly crowds of people are looking skyward - mesmerized, momentarily connected, and lifted above the dailiness of their lives. McCann explores this moment of connection through a series of different relationships in the novel: two brothers, a mother and daughter, marriages, friendships, work colleagues.
I wasn't around in 1974 to remember this event; however, I am assured by some of my book club members who were that the tightrope walking incident fired up the imagination and brought tremendous joy and excitement to so many people. Every time one of my friends remembers her experience of it, her face just radiates happiness. It is lovely to see.
I did experience New York in September 2001, and I relate entirely to the sense connectedness, though of an altogether different mood and kind. 9/11 hovers over this novel; it will for anyone who reads it. I really love the publisher's description and will quote here since I'm still not ready to trust my own words on the subject: "Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence - awakening in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal."
Did I mention already that I love this novel? Such a great American story. We had the best time discussing it at book club. The 70s attire and music did not hurt the conversation either...