Colum
McCann Let the Great World Spin Random House
Colum McCann
receiving the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction.
Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit: Brendan
Bourke
CITATION
Like the funambulist at the
heart of this extraordinary novel, Colum McCann accomplishes
a gravity-defying feat: from ten ordinary lives he crafts
an indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying New
York City, and offers through his generosity of spirit
and lyrical gifts an ecstatic vision of the human courage
required to stay aloft above the ever-yawning abyss.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the dawning light of a late-summer
morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed,
staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August
1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running,
dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter
mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew
of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s
intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let
the Great World Spin is the author’s most
ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the
pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City
in the 1970s
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colum McCann is the internationally
bestselling author of the novels Let the Great World
Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and
Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed
story collections. His fiction has been published in
thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner
of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory
of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire’s
“Best and Brightest,” and his short film
Everything in This Country Must was a 2005 Oscar
nominee. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New
York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and
The Paris Review, he teaches at Hunter College
and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
October 22
Irish Embassy
2234 Massachusetts Ave NW Washington D.C
7 pm
October 28
"Behind the Book" 3rd annual benefit
William Bennett Gallery, 65 Greene Street, New York,
6.30 pm.
October 28 Beal Bocht Cafe, 445 W 238th St the Bronx,
NY 8.30 pm
November 10
"The Grove," 597 Route 35, Shrewsbury, NJ
6 pm novelteas.org
November 19
Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer Street, Brooklyn, New
York,
7 pm petescandystore.com
December 17
Paris Review Salon in conjunction with NYU
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th
Street, NY, NY 10011
7 pm with poet Timothy Donnelly
EXCERPT
Those who saw him hushed.
On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street.
Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself,
awful and beautiful. Some thought at first
that it must have been a trick of the light, something
to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall.
Others figured it might be the perfect city joke–stand
around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted
their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring
upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end
of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched,
the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of
the building, shaped dark against the gray of the
morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction
worker. Or a jumper.
Up there, at the height of
a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy
against the cloudy sky.
He could only be seen at
certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at
street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander
from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework,
gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had
yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from
one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape
that held them there, their necks craned, torn between
the promise of doom and the disappointment of the
ordinary. It was the dilemma of the watchers: they
didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all,
some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers,
but they didn’t want to miss the moment either,
if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.
Around the watchers, the
city still made its everyday noises. Car horns. Garbage
trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The
M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed
down into a pothole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched
against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of
trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways.
Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases
rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked
against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters
of conversation out into the street. But the watchers
could have taken all the sounds and smashed them down
into a single noise and still they wouldn’t
have heard much at all: even when they cursed, it
was done quietly, reverently. They found themselves
in small groups together beside the traffic lights
on the corner of Church and Dey; gathered under the
awning of Sam’s barbershop; in the doorway of
Charlie’s Audio; a tight little theater of men
and women against the railings of St. Paul’s
Chapel; elbowing for space at the windows of the Woolworth
Building. Lawyers. Elevator operators. Doctors. Cleaners.
Prep chefs. Diamond merchants. Fish sellers.
Sad- jeaned whores. All of
them reassured by the presence of one another.
Stenographers. Traders. Deliveryboys.
Sandwichboard men. Cardsharks. Con Ed. Ma Bell. Wall
Street. A locksmith in his van on the corner of Dey
and Broadway. A bike messenger lounging against a
lamppost on West. A red- faced rummy out looking for
an early- morning pour. From the Staten Island Ferry
they glimpsed him. From the meatpacking warehouses
on the West Side. From the new high- rises in Battery
Park. From the breakfast carts down on Broadway. From
the plaza below. From the towers themselves.
Sure, there were some who
ignored the fuss, who didn’t want to be bothered.
It was seven forty- seven in the morning and they
were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen,
a telephone. Up they came from the subway stations,
from limousines, off city buses, crossing the street
at a clip, refusing the prospect of a gawk. Another
day, another dolor. But as they passed the little
clumps of commotion they began to slow down.
Some stopped altogether, shrugged, turned nonchalantly,
walked to the
corner, bumped up against
the watchers, went to the tips of their toes, gazed
over the crowd, and then introduced themselves with
a Wow or a Gee- whiz or a Jesus
H. Christ.
The man above remained rigid,
and yet his mystery was mobile. He stood beyond the
railing of the observation deck of the south tower–at
any moment he might just take off.
Below him, a single pigeon
swooped down from the top floor of the Federal Office
Building, as if anticipating the fall. The movement
caught the eyes of some watchers and they followed
the gray flap against the small of the standing man.
The bird shot from one eave to another, and it was
then the watchers noticed that they had been joined
by others at the windows of offices, where blinds
were being lifted and a few glass panes labored upward.
All that could be seen was a pair of elbows or the
end of a shirtsleeve, or an arm garter, but then it
was joined by a head, or an odd- looking pair of hands
above it, lifting the frame even higher. In the windows
of nearby skyscrapers, figures came to look out–men
in shirtsleeves and women in bright blouses, wavering
in the glass like funhouse apparitions.
Higher still, a weather helicopter
executed a dipping turn over the Hudson–a curtsy
to the fact that the summer day was going to be cloudy
and cool anyway–and the rotors beat a rhythm
over the warehouses of the West Side. At first the
helicopter looked lopsided in its advance, and a small
side window was slid open as if the machine were looking
for air. A lens appeared in the open window. It caught
a brief flash of light. After a moment the helicopter
corrected beautifully and spun across the expanse.
Some cops on the West Side Highway switched on their
misery lights, swerved fast off the exit ramps, making
the morning all the more magnetic.
A charge entered the air
all around the watchers and–now that the day
had been made official by sirens–there was a
chatter among them, their balance set on edge, their
calm fading, and they turned to one another and began
to speculate, would he jump, would he fall, would
he tiptoe along the ledge, did he work there, was
he solitary, was he a decoy, was he wearing a uniform,
did anyone have binoculars? Perfect strangers touched
one another on the elbows. Swearwords went between
them, and whispers that there’d been a botched
robbery, that he was some sort of cat burglar, that
he’d taken hostages, he was an Arab, a Jew,
a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really just a publicity
stunt, a corporate scam, Drink more Coca- Cola,
Eat more Fritos, Smoke more Parliaments, Spray more
Lysol, Love more Jesus. Or that he was a protester
and he was going to hang a slogan, he would slide
it from the towerledge, leave it there to flutter
in the breeze, like some giant piece of sky laundry–nixon
out now! remember ’nam, sam! independence for
indochina!–and then someone said that maybe
he was a hang glider or a parachutist, and all the
others laughed, but they were perplexed by the cable
at his feet, and the rumors began again, a collision
of curse and whisper, augmented by an increase in
sirens, which got their hearts pumping even more,
and the helicopter found a purchase near the west
side of the towers, while down in the foyer of the
World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across
the marble floor, and the undercovers were whipping
out badges from beneath their shirts, and the fire
trucks were pulling into the plaza, and the redblue
dazzled the glass, and a flatbed truck arrived with
a cherry picker, its fat wheels bouncing over the
curb, and someone laughed as the picker kiltered sideways,
the driver looking up, as if the basket might reach
all that sad huge way, and the security guards were
shouting into their walkie- talkies, and the whole
August morning was blown wide open, and the watchers
stood rooted, there was no going anywhere for a while,
the voices rose to a crescendo, all sorts of accents,
a babel, until a small redheaded man in the Home Title
Guarantee Company on Church Street lifted the sash
of his office window, placed his elbows on the sill,
took a deep breath, leaned out, and roared into the
distance: Do it, asshole! There was a dip before the
laughter, a second before it sank in among the watchers,
a reverence for the man’s irreverence, because
secretly that’s what so many of them felt–Do
it, for chrissake! Do it!–and then a torrent
of chatter was released, a call- and- response, and
it seemed to ripple all the way from the windowsill
down to the sidewalk and along the cracked pavement
to the corner of Fulton, down the block along Broadway,
where it zigzagged down John, hooked around to Nassau,
and went on, a domino of laughter, but with an edge
to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers
realized with a shiver that no matter what they said,
they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone
arc downward all that distance, to disappear from
the sight line, flail, smash to the ground, and give
the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all
they needed to become a family was one millisecond
of slippage, while the others–those who wanted
him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink,
but no farther–felt viable now with disgust
for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself,
step backward into the arms of the cops instead of
the sky. They were jazzed now.
Pumped.
The lines were drawn.
Do it, asshole!
Don’t do it!
Way above there was a movement.
In the dark clothing his every twitch counted. He
folded over, a half- thing, bent, as if examining
his shoes, like a pencil mark, most of which had been
erased. The posture of a diver. And then they saw
it. The watchers stood, silent. Even those who had
wanted the man to jump felt the air knocked out. They
drew back and moaned.
A body was sailing out into
the middle of the air. He was gone. He’d done
it. Some blessed themselves. Closed their eyes. Waited
for the thump. The body twirled and caught and flipped,
thrown around by the wind.
Then a shout sounded across
the watchers, a woman’s voice: God, oh God,
it’s a shirt, it’s just a shirt.
It was falling, falling,
falling, yes, a sweatshirt, fluttering, and then their
eyes left the clothing in midair, because high above
the man had unfolded upward from his crouch, and a
new hush settled over the cops above and the watchers
below, a rush of emotion rippling among them, because
the man had arisen from the bend holding a long thin
bar in his hands, jiggling it, testing its weight,
bobbing it up and down in the air, a long black bar,
so pliable that the ends swayed, and his gaze was
fixed on the far tower, still wrapped in scaffolding,
like a wounded thing waiting to be reached, and now
the cable at his feet made sense to everyone, and
whatever else it was there would be no chance they
could pull away now, no morning coffee, no conference
room cigarette, no nonchalant carpet shuffle; the
waiting had been made magical, and they watched as
he lifted one dark- slippered foot, like a man about
to enter warm gray water. The watchers below pulled
in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly
shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know,
though they had not heard it before.
