Cultural Sponge - The Joe Pagetta Blog

Everyone is connected in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, one of the most beautiful contemporary novels I’ve read in years.  But characters aren’t connected in the way that, say, they are in the film Crash. Yes, they cross paths, but it’s art  –  a man walking, dancing and even bouncing on a tightrope suspended between the Twin Towers — that is the backdrop for all their lives.  Using Phillipe Petite’s iconic walk on August 7, 1974, McCann tells us the fictional stories of a myriad of New Yorkers — natives and immigrants, blacks and whites, men and woman, established and on the fringe.  It takes place in a Big Apple of a different era, when taking the subway two more stops could drop you off in a completely different world.  And like the Towers’ role in the excellent documentary of Petit’s walk, Man on a Wire, they are a characters here too, though not in a nostalgic way.  As one reviewer wrote of Let The Great World Spin, the best 9/11 novel takes place more than 25 years before it happened.

I think what’s so masterful about the novel, and what moves me the most, is that each character, like the funambulist based on Petit, steps out on to their own tightrope. Whether it’s the Irish immigrant Corrigan, a monk of the order of the Franciscans who ministers to prostitutes in the Bronx, or his brother who can’t help but be inspired by Corrigan’s selflessness and what seems at times like blind faith, or the group of mothers from different backgrounds who gather to mourn the sons they’ve lost in Vietnam. The characters in Let the Great World Spin are creating a kind of performance art of their own. Fittingly, it’s an artist who feels responsible for the death of Corrigan and a young prostitute that takes a risk by going back, and finds redemption in both herself and Corrigan’s brother.

With each move these characters make — the simple offering of ride to an unfamiliar neighborhood; the major leap of adopting orphaned children; the dragging of a young girl into a life of prostitution by a mother who knows no other option — is a step on the tightrope, a bounce on the wire,  a dance with destiny. But unlike Petit, sometimes the walker don’t make it back from the wire to the ledge. That is the risk they take, and that, I think, is what the tightrope walk that shadows everyone in the novel represents, the risks we all take, every day, to love, to live and to connect, and make art out of our lives.

The woman of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help are risking everything in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Young, idealistic and gutsy Skeeter Phelan, and the maids (”the help”) she encourages to share their stories of working for white families in the segregated south, could be killed for what they’re doing, and they know it. If Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Towers is the backdrop to the character develop in Let The Great World Spin, it’s the murder of Medgar Evers that looms heavily in the lives of the characters in the The Help. It’s a high wire act of the tallest order, and it’s nerve-wracking, oft-times riveting and extremely entertaining. Work of fiction? Psuedo-memoir? Anthropological study? You be the judge.

I learned about The Help after a conversation with John Seigenthaler, journalist, former administrative assistant to Senator Robert Kennedy, founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and long time host of A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television. We were talking about the Southern Festival of Books last year, and I asked him if there was anyone he was excited about, and someone I really shouldn’t miss. He said “Kathryn Stockett” without hesitation, and added that The Help was a wonderful book. When a man who risked his own life on the Freedom Rides in the 60s recommends a book dealing with segregation in the south, you listen.  Stockett was great at the Festival, and I quickly picked up a copy, then already in its 30-something printing. Oddly though, for a book that popular, I not only hadn’t heard of it, I didn’t know anyone who read it or was reading it.  Until, that is, I’d mentioned it, especially to women. They either read it, were reading it, were planning on reading it or knew someone who was reading it, like the book was a secret being passed around. Reading it, especially since it seems to be a book being read mostly by women, feels like being granted entrance into an exclusive club, with millions of members.

Being an English major is like being in a secret club without the handshakes and fancy rings. We’re a strange bunch, with strange sensibilities and fixations.  I wonder though, if all these years I’ve been part of the club, I carried some mark of exclusion. How does one be an English Major, and not get around to reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,  one of the greatest English language novels of all time?  Well, be gone, mark of exclusion!

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Lolita is a doozy — a big, heavy, monstrous (Humbert Humbert is a monster, after all) work of genius. A single read, just to grasp the narrative, is not enough, so I hope to return to it someday. When I read Ulysses in college, I needed an entire other book to help me get through it. It’s a shame, though, that I don’t read books with that kind of attentiveness anymore. There are too many other books to read, and too much life to live and work to do — and no tests to take. But I imagine this book would become more and more enthralling with deeper study and subsequent readings.

Without that additional attention, though, it’s still unquestionably a masterpiece. Talk about taking risks. The book is fearless. There’s no need for me to mention plot points in a classic, but if all you know of Lolita are watered-down pop-culture references, you’re doing your senses a great disservice. It’s really a road trip novel, through America, through the English language, through storytelling, through wit and humor; through our own fears, wants and desires. Then imagine that road trip turns into a crash course for your sensibilities, testing the limits of what you believe is possible in a work of fiction, and what you’re willing to let the (admittedly unreliable) narrator get away with. I can’t imagine any artist, even a funambulist for that matter, approaching their work the same after reading Lolita.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.