Ten Years Later

The forward-thinking librarian who heads the Montlake reading group selected Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin right as the world was remembering all the pain and trauma of September 11^th, 2001.  We were to have read it and discussed it weeks prior to the actual date, but I was a little behind schedule, only really finishing as news media and journalists set the time up for renewed attention. 

For quite some time I read Let the Great World Spin as a story.  It was New York.  It was Ireland.  It was brothers.  It was family.  It was a monk.   It was race and Vietnam.  It was street life.  It was the 60’s.  Then we met the tight-rope walker, dancer, performer, master.  The towers come into view and the pieces are all coming together quickly, finally, clearly.

There were no favorites for me.  Every character had a pretty unique story which could have stood alone in New York as a valid point of view and way of life.  Timing was so crucial to the life and death of each person McCann creates on his way that as a reader I begin to wonder whether the next move of any character will throw them under the rails of love or tragedy.

New York is one city in one time and place, but seems to be everything and all its own, too.  The people in New York City have a story, but McCann really makes a case for the city having a story that the people participate in.  The buildings are part of New York, and New York is part of its buildings, but even they are not the determiner of the city, but only some part.  New York is still whole when men and women grieve, yet when they lose too much all of New York is not enough.