The Spinning World

Let the Great World Spin 

by Colum McCann

“Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.”   ― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin


  The world spins and our lives go on. Each of these lives is made up of words and stories that intersect with each other. The stories overlap and connections are made and broken. This novel takes up these notions and, adding a focal point with the event and wonder at the achievement of a mysterious tightrope walker in August, 1974, tells the stories of some lives of people in New York City whose world like ours was spinning.  “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.” (p 349)
  I was impressed with this novel filled with calamities and disorder, people from judges to prostitutes, the high and the low -- McCann was not afraid to portray the underbelly of society, the immigrants (one would not expect less from such a well-traveled Irish writer), and the magic of the funambulist at the center of it all. The disorder begins even before the two Irish brothers whose story opens the novel when one of them is knocked down by an explosion. There will be more disorder before their story ends, but the spinning theme is also the glue that ties the stories and the characters' world together with a sort of structure. The stories include those told by the mother of Corrigan and his brother: "she would launch into a story of her own creation, fables that sent my brother and me to different places, and we would wake in the morning wondering if we had dreamed different parts of the same dream, or if we had duplicated each other, or if in some strange world our dreams had overlapped . . . We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's chance."(p 68)
  Yes, chance plays a role in the novel. But the intersection of lives also evokes the era, one centered on that famous tightrope walk between the twin towers.  This era, one that was lost in September of 2001, is merely adumbrated in this novel which seems to lose focus at times,  and it is story, not plot, driven.  I am reminded of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland which also tells a story of post-2001 New York City with similarly disparate characters, but a more focused plot.   The overall effect of McCann's narrative is one that seems fitting to New York City (although there are many other stories of the city that are not included here) and the new milennium. Each reader will have to decide for himself what the stories mean.


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Twenty-first Century Odyssey

Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

"I'm sure I told you about him. A cricket guy I used to know. A guy from Brooklyn."

- - Netherland, p. 6.

While I have traveled some over the course of my adult life I have never traveled to London; but my image of London was always that of a modern cosmopolitan metropolis. Thus it was with some surprise that I read of the "parochialism" of London as I began the last third of Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland. The protagonist, a Dutchman named Hans van den Broek, has just returned from several years in New York City and is not pleased with the treatment he receives from the Londoners he meets. This is just one of several instances of what I would describe as hubris exhibited by Hans as he preens with a reflexive post-modern attitude that I did not find very appealing. While he is in London he finds out about his wife's affair with their "friend" Martin from his son. His wife merely nods to him and he is off into the night. This was not a surprise as I had been expecting them to separate since before page fifty, in fact it seemed like they had already done so, or at least behaved as if they ought to and they also seem to be able to get back together as well: all Hans' relationships seem to be both fleeting and in flux throughout his life.


Hans' journey (memories of Thomas Mann) is an odyssey through the multicultural neighborhoods of New York City, spiked with bouts of Cricket fever inspired by his Trinidadian friend, Chuck Ramkisoon. Chuck is a man of many trades including driving instructor, but he is primarily a promoter of Chuck! When Hans leaves him for London that is a let down of sorts, but the novel maintains some interest, if nothing else for its' quirkiness and its ability to surprise - although Chuck's demise is not a surprise since the author (is this hubris as well?) introduces Chuck as a character through the report of his death. Have you ever found out you were a partner in an enterprise only after your supposed partner had "parted" this world? If you like a well-written off-beat novel with only minor flaws (some may not even notice them) then this may be a novel you should consider - you may find, as I did, that Hans' friend Chuck was the most interesting character of all.



Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. Vintage Books, New York. 2009 (2008)