Book Review: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

There is a dizziness that overcomes you when reading Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann—a sense of head-spinning adrenaline that emanates from the descriptions of the tightrope walker. The sheer height of the walk between the two towers, the disorientation of looking down – is captured eloquently and vividly in the pages of the text. Perhaps for me it was the timing of reading this book—of reading it while temping at an office forty-four floors up that has given me such a different perspective on the city of Chicago, and the vertiginous view I see daily when I too look down on my lunch break to the river walk so far below, that made these descriptions resonate so deeply and vividly.
As central as the tightropers walk is to the narrative, it is the impermanence of the event and the assessment of the author that New York is a space constructed not of monuments but moments and acts of presentism and impermanence—chance encounters, such as a man walking a high wire strung between two towering steel spires—that most resonated with me.
While at times the eventual intersections of the multi-character perspective of the book felt a little too convenient, there is also a beauty to the small moments of overlap that are then left to grow. These moments of overlap are also gentle reminders of the overlaps we experience in our own day-to-day routines—the individuals who share our bus or train on the commute to or from work, or the person in the coffee line or elevator whose schedules always align with ours. These moments of intersection are ones McCann seems to use to encourage connection. As one of his characters notes, “the city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday” (248). It is likely my own personal bias and gravitation towards the small things, but I couldn’t help but read the moments and points of intersection that led to connection as those moments of good that crawl out from underneath the routine of the everyday.

This book will long be on my list of favorites, and I cannot belief that I am ten years late to reading it. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys novels that involve multi-character perspectives, and a focus on the small moments that make up the everyday. And if you are uncertain, perhaps read the Author’s note first which ends with this beautiful line “Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”