Having Read "Let The Great World Spin" - 3-17-2013

  [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.  sch 9/22/2025] 

 After reading The Solitude of Prime Numbers, I stayed modern, but switched back to America with Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin. I have no idea what it takes to win the National Book Award; still, I liked the novel.

I have given up what makes up the organization of a novel. McCann uses books and chapters as if he were a Victorian. I see the chapters as close to standalone stories. The chapters tell of one character's perspective on the action, which pivots around Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. The books move the plot chronologically from one set of chapters to another. I must say the author varies from this description. The important thing is the organization helps tell the story.

McCann uses a different [I omitted a word and I cannot recall it 12 years later. sch. 9/22/25.]  Milan Kundera did the same thing in The Joke. I think Kundera wrote his one female character better than McCann does his several - I remain unnerved by Kundera - but McCann writes five female characters so they do not sound alike. This is one of those female characters:

 I don't know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I'm going to giet him in the corner until He tells me the the truth.

I'm going to slap Him stupid and push Him around until He can't run away. Until He's looking up at me and then I'll get him to tell me why He done what He done to me and what He done to Corrie and why do all the good good ones die and where is Jazzlyn now and why she ended up there and He allowed me to what I did to her.

"This The House Horse Built"

Who has not thought similar thoughts about God, or had similar feelings? The character is a 38-year-old African-American, mother of Jazzlyn on her way to suicide. That we empathize with such a character strikes me as great writing.

Colum McCann writes a historical novel. The historical event may seem trivial compared to the Civil War, but there feels to have been great research on 1974 New York. McCann looks too young to have first-hand knowledge of the period. 

McCann seems to have the same interest in the interconnectivity of people as did Don DeLillo in Underworld. He uses fewer words than DeLillo, but covers less territory.

I feel a little punch drunk from all these New York stories. Henry James and Georges Simeon are on deck for my fiction selections. Still, I think I am better for reading DeLillo and McCann so closely together. They differ without detracting from one another. They remind us that life goes on like a perpetual conveyor belt - even if we do not get a ride for perpetuity. 

I read a lot lately relating to narratives, and I have written on these readings. McCann using the multi-character perspective has me doing more thinking. Thinking like this: this Rashomon-like shifting of perspectives is democratic in its equality, and therein lies its appeal. I think another way of putting this - we cannot privilege one particular point of view because no human perspective is omniscient. Even a hack like me has a vision they are trying to put into words which will be read. I suggest all of McCann's characters carry on the author's themes. Is it not possible that the break away from a comprehensive narrative viewpoint is a loss of opinion about humanity on the part of writers?

Let me finish with this point about history in New York, which might be taken for history of America.

sch 

[And there is where my note ends. It was written on the back of a manuscript, but these were the only pages I found. Today, I would say the history of New York is not the history of America, but since the city has such a high rate of publishers, it has become a stand-in for America. sch 9/22/25.]