A novelist for a multi-cultural age

I recently read two novels, Let the Great World Spin (2009) and TransAtlantic (2013), by the Irish-born writer Colum McCann that astonished me by his ability to imaginatively get inside the minds of people of different races, different social classes, different cultures and different historical eras, and give the reader an idea of what it was like to be them.

Thomas Wolfe wrote great novels by processing his own life experience.  I would take nothing away from respect for his achievement.  I think McCann’s achievement, in processing the life experiences of people very different from himself and from each other, is of a different order.  Reading his novels helps me feel more at home in a multi-cultural age, in which I rub shoulders with people whose backgrounds and assumptions are different from my own.

I don’t, however, recommend his novels because they are multi-cultural.  I recommend them because McCann is a good storyteller and literary stylist.

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Let the Great World Spin is about the destinies of a diverse gallery of characters in New York City, linked by two events of August 7, 1974—one real, one fictional.

The real event was a tightrope walker performing on a cable slung between the newly built Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.  The fictional event, which occurs in the first chapter, is the death in a highway accident of John Corrigan, an Irish priest who is trying to live according to the precepts of Jesus among prostitutes and outcasts in the Bronx.

McCann had the ability to imagine himself inside the heads of people different from each other and different from himself—men and women, black, white and Hispanic, rich, poor and middle class, and, repeatedly, the mind of a death-defying tightrope walker.

He was a marvelous descriptive writer, both in his ability to portray human thoughts and feelings and his ability to depict life in New York in the 1970s.  His prose is a pleasure and an inspiration for anyone who cares about writing.

Corrigan is at the center of the novel, but is never presented in his own voice, but only through the eyes of others—his older brother from Ireland, a drug-addicted artist who attends his funeral, a prostitute whom he befriends, a nurse who is in love with him, and a judge who mistakes him for a pimp.

He is repeatedly beaten by pimps for showing kindness to prostitutes, such as letting them use the toilet in his apartment. He never fights back, but tries to return good for evil.  We get glimpses of how hard it must be to try to live by such a commitment, not to mention how hard it is to keep his vow of chastity.

I won’t try to summarize the book or list all its characters, but one of the most memorable consists of the reflections of Tillie Henderson, a 38-year-old grandmother and career prostitute, looking back on her life prior to hanging herself in a prison cell.

In her whole life, literally no-one has ever been kind to her except Corrigan and a Middle Eastern man who once paid her to spend a weekend with him so he could appreciate her beauty.   Her idea of love is the abusive relationships she has had with pimps.  She thinks that when she dies, she will confront God and demand to know why He treated her as He did.

Also especially memorable are the chapters devoted to Claire, a white woman who is married to a judge and lives on Park Avenue, and Gloria, a cultured black woman who lives in the same public housing project as Corrigan, Tillie and Tillie’s prostitute daughter Jazzlyn, but tries to wall herself off from the poverty and crime around her.  Claire and Gloria are both members of a support group for mothers of sons who have been killed in Vietnam.

They have misunderstandings, caused by sensitivity about race, but their bond proves strong enough to overcome this.  On the last page of the next to last chapter, Gloria and Claire come across Tillie’s orphaned grandchildren and Gloria on impulse decides to adopt them.

The last chapter, set in 2006, is from the viewpoint of one of the grandchildren, now a happy and thriving adult, as is her sister, thanks to the kindness of Gloria and Claire.  The hopeful note of this chapter changes the tone of the whole novel.

In an essay and an interview in the back of the book, McCann said the novel was inspired by the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers.  I never would have guessed this.

He said his father-in-law worked on the 59th floor of the World Trade Center and got out in time.  The father-in-law walked home and arrived covered with dust and ashes blown by the wind.  He never wore those clothes or shoes again because he thought the ashes may have been the cremated remains of firefighters and others who died in the Twin Towers.

The title of the novel is based on a line of Tennyson — “Let the great world spin forever, down the ringing grooves of change.”  McCann said Tennyson was influenced by the Mu’allaqat, a set of seven Arabic poems from the sixth century, which asked, “Is there any hope that this resolution can bring me solace?”

I thank my friend Katherine Flynn for suggesting I read this book.

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In TransAtlantic, McCann writes of three historic journeys from North America to Ireland—the aviators John Alcock and Gordon Brown making the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight in 1919, Frederick Douglass on an abolitionist tour of Ireland in 1845-46 and Senator George Mitchell’s peacemaking mission in 1998.  Then in the second and third sections, he writes of four generations of women whose lives criss-cross with Douglass, Alcock and Brown, and Mitchell.

The lives of the four obscure fictional women are as worthy of interest as the four famous historical men.

The Alcock and Brown chapter is the most compelling.  The two British veterans of World War One crossed the whole Atlantic Ocean, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in a machine made mostly of wood and hand-stitched fabric.  Pieces blew off in mid-flight.  They were caught in clouds in which they couldn’t tell up from down.  McCann makes me appreciate their skill, courage and luck.  It is comparable in that respect to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  The pilot Alcock was killed in a plane crash six months later on a supposedly routine flight from England to the Paris Air Show.  The navigator Brown never flew again.

The long chapter on Frederick Douglass shows his complex relationship to Ireland.  His visit was sponsored by wealthy philanthropists who genuinely hated slavery and who, to Douglass’s surprise, were largely free of racism and condescension.  When he began his visit, he was still technically a slave under U.S.law.  Someone bought his freedom from his former owner while he was there, according to McCann.

Douglass’s visit coincided with the Great Famine.  The poverty and starvation of poor Irish tenant farmers were worse than anything Douglass saw as a slave in Maryland.  He met Daniel Connell O’Connell, the great advocate of Irish freedom, and they found each other to be kindred spirits.

Yet he felt he couldn’t go too far in showing sympathy for the poor Irish without antagonizing his sponsors and jeopardizing his mission on behalf of enslaved black people in the USA, who depended on him to be their champion.  He told himself the Irish poor might have been starving, but they were not enslaved.

The unassuming George Mitchell, the son of an Irish-American father and Lebanese-American mother, was a different personality type from the charismatic Douglass, and was on a different mission.  But McCann brought out how he and Douglass, as public figures, both faced the stress of always having to be on guard, of always having to think about how their words and actions might be interpreted or misinterpreted.

The first of the four women characters is Lily, a housemaid to one of the families who hosted Douglass.  She is impressed by him and decides to emigrate to the United States where, after many ups and downs in her life, she ends up as a volunteer nurse in a Union Army hospital during the Civil War.  McCann vividly describes to horrors of conditions in those hospitals.  Surgeons could do little except sew up wounds and amputate gangrenous limbs, and hospitals lacked not only anesthetics, but beds and learn sheets.  She encounters her only son among the dying.

She falls in love with a Norwegian-American businessman who supplies ice to the hospital.  They are married; she has five more sons and a daughter.  The husband and two sons are killed in an accident, and she takes over the business and, despite being functionally illiterate, operates it successfully.

Colum McCann

Her daughter Emily becomes a writer, and she and granddaughter Lottie are a reporter and photographer in St. John’s, Newfoundland, who cover Alcock’s and Brown’s preparation and departure.  Lottie marries a Protestant man in Belfast, and has a daughter, Hannah, whose son is killed in the tit-for-tat terrorism in Northern Ireland in 1978; McCann is vague on which faction was responsible.   Lottie and Hannah meet George Mitchell on a tennis court 20 years later.

The last chapter is set in the year 2011, during President Obama’s visit to Ireland.  The feisty 78-year-old Hannah is broke, without living children or close friends, and is about to lose her home to mortgage foreclosure.  She is befriended by a couple in Dublin, a Kenyan immigrant college professor who is an authority on Frederick Douglass and his Irish-born wife who, I guess, symbolize the new modern multi-cultural Ireland.

The four women have as much sorrow and suffering in their lives as joy, maybe more, but McCann leaves me with a feeling that life goes on and people manage to survive no matter what.

There are two kinds of good writers—the kind whose prose style in invisible so that you don’t think about it, but only about the subject of the writing, and the kind whose writing is full of memorable word choices and figures of speech.  McCann is the second kind.  Some reviewers found his writing a little too fancy for their taste.  I liked it a lot.

Tags: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, Multi-Culturalism, TransAtlantic