Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

A few months ago when the organizer in chief of my book club put up a poll for the month, this was my choice. Instead the members of the book club chose a different book that was long and unwieldy and got horrible reviews on Amazon, and which I quite frankly didn't feel like reading. So I didn't. But I kept this one on my list and picked it up not long ago and read it without the motivation of a pending book club discussion.

The novel takes place in New York City in the 1970's, and revolves around the day that Philippe Petit strung a wire between the Twin Towers and walked the wire well over a thousand feet above the streets below. This was what intrigued me originally about the book, especially after watching Man on Wire a couple years ago (a movie I'd highly recommend, although I'd warn anyone afraid of heights that there are moments that may make you queasy). Petit himself is never mentioned by name in the novel, although he is given a few small sections and a voice in the story. Rather, McCann slowly weaves together several narratives of other citizens of the city. They seem unrelated at first, but slowly come together over the course of the book while maintaining their individual voices and narrative integrity.

There were a few points in the book where I felt like McCann's prose tried just a little too hard, enough to be distracting, but most of the time I was impressed with his ability to jump from one voice to another, to inhabit such different characters. Some of the ways that the characters' lives intertwined seemed as though they should have been a leap, but they didn't feel like it, at least not to me. And New York of the 1970's took on a life of its own in the book. I could see and feel and hear the characters' surroundings. I was drawn in almost from the beginning, and I enjoyed the book quite a lot.

CAVEAT: I would warn potential readers that, being New York in the 1970's, parts of the book are quite gritty. There was even a large section that I skimmed because there was language and description that I didn't care to be reading. But it never felt unnecessary or gratuitous (and I've read books where it has).