Review: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Random House, 2009, 368 pp.

Rating: C

In 1974, all of New York watched Philippe Petit walk a tight rope between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Let the Great World Spin tells the stories of an assortment of characters in New York at the time, as the event is always present in the background of what is going on in the narrative. Although the novel would have accomplished the same thing without the shared event of the tight rope walker, it creates a good context for this award winning novel.

There are two rather key reasons why I don't feel like this novel is worth all of the accolades being heaped on it. First and most important, the prose is pretty rough at times, but inconsistently so. There are entire chapters where I could actually find myself getting lost in the way McCann writes, but others where I wanted to tear pages out of the book. His style varies from section to section, even borrowing fellow Irishman James Joyce's hyphenated dialogue style occasionally (but not always). It actually makes the thing come across as purely disjointed rather than of any originality.

To make things even harder to get behind, the varied cast of characters is really quite stale. The problem with any novel that has too many characters and not a very high page count is that rarely is there enough time to get to know any of the characters well enough for them to really become interesting or memorable. This turns out to be exactly the case in Let the World Spin, as the characters are not only lacking the necessary fleshing out, but are pretty much entirely generic. There is a hooker who is smarter than she looks, a radical Irish monk, an artist couple that seems to have domestic troubles, and a mother mourning her dead son. It really seems like McCann pulled the characters out of some list of generic archetypes and tried to make them interesting.

Starting with generic characters isn't necessarily a recipe for failure, but the key is to put some kind of twist on the characters. There needs to be something, as the novel progresses, that will cause these characters to change. This is pretty much a requirement for any piece of art that considers itself character based. In television, if a show lasts for six or seven seasons and the main characters in the beginning are the exact same as they are at the close of the show, that's a shitty show that had no business going on for that long. It's much the same as a novel. Although a book doesn't quite have the amount of time to develop characters in the way a long-running television show does, and in that sense is a more difficult task, it is absolutely necessary for a novel to accomplish this to be successful as a character piece.

All problems aside, the novel isn't a total failure; there were definitely times when I found myself engaged in the individual stories here. There were some, like the story of the mourning mother, that were poorly written and bored me to tears, but others, like that of the Irish monk trying to get by in New York, that turned out interesting and had a couple of twists that I didn't see coming. If there is anything about his novel that saves it from being crap, it is some interesting moments and a strong overall story to tell. In the end, though, the wooden characters and infuriatingly inconsistent prose make Let the Great World Spin an average novel at best. Definitely not deserving of any major awards.