“What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 8, 2014)

This bighearted, voluptuous, riveting book – one of my favorites of the decade – is filled with contradictions. It tells an apocalyptic and ancient tale but its topic is fresh and timely. It is told without any pretensions yet it’s lyrical and bracing. It focuses on the microcosm of a family under pressure yet its theme is universal and its messages integrate age-old mythologies.

As the book opens, China – the pure white pit bull – is turning on herself, trying to eat her paws. The winds of Hurricane Katrina are gathering force. And the narrator, a young precocious and sensitive teenager named Esch, is realizing that she is pregnant. These forces and situations add up to classic tragedy, but Jesmyn Ward has other things in mind. Esch and her brothers – Skeetah, whose life and passions revolve around his prized dog and her puppies; Randall, whose dream is to get a basketball camp scholarship; and, Junior, the youngest – are a unit who support each other.

As Katrina closes in — as the internal storms play out — we view a world that is steeped with violence and tenderness. Nothing is as expected. Let me interject that I share my home with two dogs and every cell of my body abhors pit bull fighting. Yet when the inevitable scene arrived, it shattered every single one of my expectations. Skeetah massages and speaks to China like a lover; his rival coaches Kilo, the other dog, calling him “son.” Some of it is written in love language: “China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks.” This is a book that dares you to confront yourself at an elemental level.

As an added level, Jesmyn Ward weaves in the Medea and Jason story and other Greek myths. Esch is young in years, but old in wisdom: she already knows that “There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in the ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” While she is tethered to earth – her father’s hands are “like gravel,” her brother’s blood “smells like wet hot earth,” her mind is unleashed and floats to the sky.

The tenderness – yes, tenderness! – between Skeetah and China, the bond between China and Esch (“China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a waiting silence…”), and the desperation and love of this family elevates it far beyond most other contemporary books I have read. A day after reading it, I am still in its thrall.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 285 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (April 24, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official blog for Jesmyn Ward Wikipedia page on Jesmyn Ward
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other National Book Award Winners: Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• Where the Line Bleeds (2008)
• Salvage the Bones (2011) 

Nonfiction:

• Men We Reap: Memoir (September 2013)

“Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist…”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JAN 3, 2011)

There are a handful of writers who haunt me. That is, as I’m reading their books they come to me in my dreams, usually with sharp elbows and voices clamoring for attention. Cormac McCarthy effects me this way. So does, not surprisingly perhaps, Friedrich Nietzsche. No writers whisper to me in my dreams. It was the second night of reading Just Kids that I discovered here too a voice so strong and compelling so as to ring in my ears after the book is closed, the eyes shut and the brain turned off. Like caffeine, if consumed after a certain late hour, you know you’re in for a ride. Patti Smith is an original. She is a poet with the heart of a rock star and the drive of an Olympic athlete. She comes at you hard and fast and won’t let go, even in a dream state. She is that mesmerizingly good.

I was unsure what to expect with Just Kids. It won the National Book Award, so I knew it was deemed good, but I didn’t know why. Nor did I know much about the lives it depicted, principally the lives of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. I knew of them, but little else. As a photographer I was certainly familiar with Mapplethorpe’s work, much of it brutal and stark, but the life behind the work was a simple ghost. Of Patti, my slate was almost clean.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know anything. I was in deep from the first paragraph and who what and where were abstract concepts. “I was asleep when he died,” begins the foreword. “I had called the hospital to say one more good night, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again.”

What follows is the story of two young kids, Patti and Robert, both born in 1946, who discover each other, their art and the world, amongst the bohemians of New York. Each is a springboard-muse to the other. They are lovers, adventurers, soul mates, room mates and, perhaps most importantly, friends in the truest sense of the word. “We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad.” She continues: “Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”

Patti’s world ranged from poetry to visual art to music–a blending of disciplines. Here she traces her effort to find her voice, struggling to release the artist within. As a bookstore clerk, she finds herself in a bar sitting among Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Jimi Hendrix. She writes that she found an “inexplicable sense of kinship with these people.” Her’s is a story of innocence, of trying on a voice like an article of clothing, to see how it fits. In her slight modesty, she lacks the ambition that Mapplethorpe wears like a battlefield suit of armor. It is 1969 and the world is roiling with ambition, with change and excitement.

Mapplethorpe is rendered here with a quiet, yet graceful, painfulness–his need for fame and personal release is so powerful. His artist soul is struggling for expression, his homoerotic self is breaking its bonds. Heartbreakingly, we hear of Patti alone in their Chelsea hotel while Mapplethorpe walks the streets fueled by the excitement of random male encounters. “I begged him not to go,” she writes, “but he was determined to try. My tears did not stop him, so I sat and watched him dress for the night ahead. I imagined him standing on a corner, flushed with excitement, offering himself to a stranger, to make money for us.” Artistically, she watches him break into Warhol’s inner circle, an individual Patti viewed with suspicion. The grace with which she renders the transitions in their relationship, of which there are many, is evidence to the unquestioning bond between them. Later, she would say of Mapplethorpe’s images, “His pursuits were too hard core for me and he often did work that shocked me….I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality.”

Just Kids has a tone of the elegiac about it. It stops short of heightened fame, of notoriety, of sadness. Instead it sings of a time of innocence when the world was being created anew and artists lead in the struggle. It was a time when a couple of young kids from parts unknown could–and did–create themselves from whole cloth and step into the world with nothing of claim except a nascent vision. Only later would it come to be understood that such stark expression was a tipping balance between life and death. But we are spared that here. This is a hymn to the hopeful brilliance of youth.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 267 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco; Reprint edition (November 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patti Smith
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Fiction 2010 National Book Award Winner:The Lord of Misrule by Jaime Gordon

Bibliography:

• Seventh Heaven: Poems (1972)
• Witt (1973)
• Ha! Ha! Houdini (1977)
• Babel: Poems (1978)
• Woolgathering (1992)
• Early Work: 1970-1975 (1994)
• The Coral Sea: Stories (1996)
• Patti Smith Complete (1998)
• Strange Messenger (2003)
• Auguries of Innocence: Poems (2005)
• Land 250 (2008)
• Trois (2008)
• Just Kids (January 2010)

Discography:

• Horses (1975)
• Radio Ethiopia (1976)
• Easter (1978)
• Wave (1979)
• Dream of Life (1988)
• Gone Again (1996)
• Peace and Noise (1997)
• Gung Ho (2000)
• Land (1975-2002) (2002)
• Trampin’ (2004)
• Twelve (2007)
• The Coral Sea (2008)

“I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma’fact, it’s more like a religion. It’s a clouded thing. You can’t see through it. It comes down to a person’s beliefs.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 2, 2010)

Most of us, when we think of horse racing, conjure up a mint-juleps-and-roses vision of the Kentucky Derby or perhaps, Churchill Downs, attended by jewel-studded rich folk dressed up in their finery with cash to burn.

But at the rock-bottom end of the sport, horse racing is a whole other world – a world inhabited by down-on-their-luck trainers and jockeys, loan sharks and crooks, gyps and hotwalkers. This is the world Jaimy Gordon takes on – Indian Mound Downs, where the horses are mostly aging, drugged, or lame and the trainers are as crooked and cynical as they come.

Into this world steps Maggie, a young, college-educated frizzly-haired, naïve girl who has hitched her wagon to her boyfriend Tommy’s star – a “young fool” with a scheme to rescue his failing stable. He intends to ship four down-and-out horses there, race them at long odds, take the money and run before anyone knows what’s happened. But Maggie and Tommy don’t really have a clue of what they’re up against – jaded and desperate men for whom horses mean nothing and people mean even less.

Jaimy Gordon knows her way around this world and she certainly knows her horses. Each of the four parts of the book is centered on an individual horse – Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter, and the “devil horse” Lord of Misrule. These are horses filled with personality, treading their way into the flying mud with chopping legs and nostrils cavernous and flaring, neurotic as all hell, almost but not quite ready to live up to their potential. The descriptions of the horses and the races they enter and the conditions they endure are among the finest you’re ever likely to read.

Ms. Gordon’s idiosyncratic people are slightly less developed, mainly because they are down-and-out and trapped. Some of them shine: Medicine Ed, for example, who dispenses drugs to the horses is beautifully depicted and Maggie – and her cruel awakening – is also detailed with fine strokes. So is Two-Tie, Maggie’s gangster uncle who strives to be her protector. Others – including Tommy — are less so.

These lowlifes speak in their own racetrack patois (and it helps to at least be open to learning this patois); they are limited and restricted, unable to survive without the dust of the racetrack. It’s difficult to even think of them racetrack hanger-ons existing in the outside world — perhaps the one glaring fault of the novel. The characters become secondary to the world they live in, bit players who strut and fret their hour on stage when ultimately, they are mostly doomed.

Tommy reflects: “Now it all falls into place. Before, you thought you knew, and felt your way along blindly. And though this world is a black tunnel of love where the gods admonished you to search without rest for your lost twin, it’s also haired all over with false pointers, evil instructions, lost-forever dead-ends.”

There is a propulsive energy to Lord of Misrule, a voice that’s strong and original, and an intimate knowledge that’s in turn, poignant, comic, heartbreaking, and suspenseful. The surprise winner of the National Book Award this year, Lord of Misrule brings the reader right into the vortex of this seldom-seen world, squeezes hard, and does not let go.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	McPherson; First Edition edition (November 15, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jaimy Gordon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Gargoyle interview with Jaimy Gordon
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another horse novel: The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle And another set in West Virginia: Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

Bibliography:

• Shamp of the City-Solo (1974)
• She Drove Without Stopping (1990)
• Bogeywoman (1999)
• Lord of Misrule (November 2010)

“Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 6, 2010)

An imposing wooden desk with nineteen drawers floats through this book like a buoy, and sometimes with shackles, loosely uniting four disparate but interconnected narrative threads. The desk is largely a monument to Jewish survival, loss, and recovery, and mirrors the dissolution, pain, and dire hope of each character. Additionally, it is a covetous object, given a poignant and existential significance by the chorus of voices that are bound to it by their memories.

This elegiac story opens with Nadia, a now divorced and successful writer, who received the desk in 1972 from a Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky. Daniel needed a place to store furniture, and Nadia had an empty house. After a long night that resulted only in a brief kiss, he leaves her his desk, as well as other pieces of furniture, and returns to Chile and the tragic conditions of Pinochet’s Junta regime. He never returns. Years later, during a particularly low period of her life, she receives a call from a woman, Rachel Weisz, who alleges to be Varsky’s daughter, and who has called to claim the desk. In the midst of this narrative, we occasionally break to Nadia confessing to an unknown “Your Honor.” Nadia’s attachment to the desk is profound and the loss of it signals keen despair.

Rachel and her brother have lived a nomadic (yet insular) privileged life with their father, George, a mordant, esteemed antiques dealer who is legendary for his prowess in recovering any loss object. He is obsessed with scrupulously reconstructing his father’s study, to make it the way it was before the Gestapo pillaged it during World War II. Odd as this may seem, this reassembling in relation to Jewish culture and history is sublime.

There is another Jewish family, a father with two sons, Dov and Uri, whose link to the desk is more obscure and is revealed in the latter part of the book. He plaintively details the loss of his wife, Eve, and confesses to the tenuous relationship with his sons. Its climactic section is the weakest and most strained of all. I suspect that Krauss used it as a concrete plot device, but it felt ultimately inorganic.

We also meet a grieving widower, Arthur, whose wife, Lotte, once in possession of the desk, died of Alzheimer’s and left an elusive trail to a dark secret. Arthur warily and then desperately decides to investigate her past. The strands of Arthur’s narrative lead to connections with other voices and a searing self-examination.

The central denouement (there is more than one climactic scene) is the most moving and mystical of all the segments of the book, and for this reader, poetic and riveting. Its link to ancient Jewish culture is beautifully rendered and breathtaking. It makes sense of the entire book, as well as the title. I am tremendously indebted to Nicole Krauss for hypnotically transporting me to this summit of Judaic history.

Krauss is a cultivated and gifted prose writer; she edifies the reader with striking imagery while digging down to the boots of a person’s soul. At times, she is long-winded, which nearly thwarts the pace of the story. And the peppering of Nadia’s proclamations to “Your Honor” was a stylistic choice that didn’t always work for me and felt self-conscious.

This non-linear and (architecturally) unorthodox story covers approximately sixty years, and is theme-driven, with minimal plot. The engagement is often cerebral, but also powerful and acute as the threads unravel. Some characters seem whisper thin or oblique, impinged upon by the relentless peal of confession. But Krauss’ delicacy of insight and reflective wisdom, like a haunting obituary, overcomes most obstacles, even a towering desk, and comes to a transcendent conclusion.

Highly recommended for all literary collections.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Nicole Krauss
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: The History of Love

Bibliography:

• Man Walks Into a Room (2002)
• The History of Love (May 2005)
• Great House (October 2010)

Co-Edited:

• The Future Dictionary of America (August 2004)

“Some would say that Edgar Watson is a bad man by nature. Ed Watson is the man I was created. If I was created evil, somebody better hustle off to church, take it up with God. I don’t believe a man is born with a bad nature. I enjoy folks, most of ‘em. But it’s true I drink too much in my black moods, see only threats and enmity on every side. And in that darkness I strike too fast, and by the time I come clear, trouble has caught up with me again.”
~ Edgar J. Watson

Book Review:

Reviewed by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2009)

I’ve been concerned about reviewing this book from the get go. For starters, it is big at eight hundred and ninety-two pages. Getting one’s head around all those words is, plain and simple, challenging. And then there is the longevity involved, for lack of a better word. Matthiessen confesses at the outset that his first notes on the work, “to my horror date back to 1978.” That is a long time to invest in a project and the reviewer wants to do it justice. And there is the subject matter: Nothing less than a reckoning of the “last American frontier,” the turn of the century coast of southwest Florida, the Ten Thousand Islands, as reflected through the experience of a single, highly complex, enigmatic figure, Edgar J. Watson. Thrown in for good measure are themes of racism, corruption, expansionism, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, infidelity, alcoholism, sibling rivalry, political malfeasance, species extinction, ecological destruction, hurricanes, psychosis and obsession. Flavor the whole stew with more than a dash of violence and, well, you get the idea.

So, having laid bare my insecurities, I will proceed with trepidation.

The novel starts at the end, with the murder of Watson by a mob, later dubbed a posse. This is a common biographical device, starting with the subject’s death and then constructing the life leading up to it. This is fiction, however, though with a historical foundation. Watson existed. By starting in this manner, Matthiessen has done a couple of clever things. He has shaped a narrative which echos the discipline of biography. We know how the story ends. This feels right, and lends instant credibility to the pages that follow. Secondly, he has defused a tension at the outset which might otherwise drive the narrative in an unintended direction. The reader doesn’t have to wonder what happens. Instead, the reader wonders why it happened and thus enters a flow of narration which ebbs and rises like the tides upon which the story largely centers. Immediately following this bloody opening–Watson is pumped with 33 bullets–we experience a literary technique which I think is unique and, at times, brilliant.

Specifically, the novel consists of three “books.” Book One is comprised of 51 first-person renderings. There are 14 different voices, each accounting for a different perspective, each sharing how the narrator’s life intersected with the life of Watson. I want to plainly state, “Book One” affords us a literary experience that is first rate. The voices, rendered in personal style and manner, filled with colloquialisms and individual tone, sing. It is obvious that Matthiessen has a wonderful ear for nuance and dialogue. For example here is Frank Tippin, sheriff, describing Eddie Watson, son of E.J. Watson: “In his reddish looks, Eddie took after his dad, with the same kind of husky mulishness about him; what was missing was the fire in his color. He put me in mind of a strong tree dead at the heart.” Or this account by neighbor Owen Harden describing the look of dead Bet Tucker, who was murdered mysteriously on a parcel of Watson land: “Without no lips, her white buck teeth made her look starved as a dead pony. Only mercy was, no eyes was left to stare.” It is virtuosic, this ability to render so many voices so accurately.

With each of the 51 accounts a different puzzle piece is laid on the table and our story unfolds. Some of these accounts are by people who hate Watson. Some love him. Others proclaimed him simply an unsolvable mystery. We learn that Watson, as a farmer, is talented beyond comparison. But also, incongruently, he is a deadeye shot with a revolver. We discover he is a loving father and gentlemanly in his manner; yet, through the intervention of powerful friends, he beat a murder rap while traveling in the north. Each voice lays down a perspective of Watson so that what remains is a tantalizing portrait of ambiguity. There is a Watson genealogy included at the outset of the book and I found myself referring to it regularly as I attempted to keep pace with cast of characters. There is no such guide for the neighbors, towns people, freed black men, mistresses and cohorts, however–and they are abundant, which can be very confusing, particularly since many go by nicknames. By the end of this section you get a sense of the picture that has been parsed out to you, but it is not cohesive by design and the picture in the puzzle can only be approximated.

Book Two grows somewhat problematic. The technique of book one is abandoned and an omniscient narrator takes over to relate the quest of favored son Lucius and his attempt to write the biography of his father. I fear the wonderful voices of the previous section leave us and are replaced by a dogged flat style. Here is part of the prospective biography, as Lucius pitches it to a publisher (the italics are his):

“This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth.”

Matthiessen writes in an author’s note, “..the middle section, which had served originally as a kind of connecting tissue, yet contained much of the heart and brain of the whole organism, lacked its own armature or bony skeleton.” I should say at this point that the three sections were previously published independently. The author, however, never felt they worked as a trilogy and took to revising them and stitching them together whole cloth, a task that took eight years. Unfortunately, the middle section still lacks the sparkle of the sections before and after. That said, it does help us bring our puzzle into focus, locking together many of the pieces which were randomly laid out in the first section.

The final section, Book Three, takes up the voice of our anti-hero, E.J. Watson. Returning to a first-person technique, Watson gets to tell his story. And here we start to understand all that has preceded. The temptation is to believe we now understand everything. But how can we understand a voice which is, by all accounts, including his own, filled with duplicity and layered in mystery? I was never sure if Matthiessen wanted the reader to draw conclusions from Watson’s personal account or if he left the door open for suspicion. I didn’t find this device convincing, in other words. The third section, however, does afford the reader the complete linear picture. It is here we have the only cohesive account of the events in this life, however clouded and self-serving they may delivered. It is also the place where Watson’s shadow self, an “alien presence” is first revealed, affording us some insight into the conundrum of Edgar Watson. While suffering a beating at the hands of his father, the young Edgar realized the “first manifestation of ‘Jack Watson,’ a shadow brother.” He confesses to inventing this sibling to deal with the pain and trauma of abuse. This shadow being explains the “crazy eyes” we’ve heard tell of evidenced during times of violence in the mature Watson. It also lends us insight into the title, as shadows permeate the landscape as well as the personality.

If I have belabored the mechanics of this novel it is because the novel is built upon a unique and multifaceted structure and is more solid because of it. It, the structure, warrants description. If that structure creeks and moans occasionally under its own weight, it is of no consequence. Matthiessen is clearly obsessed with Watson and is attempting to convey a kaleidoscopic sense of the character and the times in which he lived. He delivers to us his subject in all facets and from all angles. It is as if Ishmael, the crew of the Pequod, and Ahab himself were each to relate their singular version of ambition, obsession and destruction, as well as whale hunting.

Imagine what you know of the great American West, the drive across the plains and the development and commerce that followed. Or Imagine the early Northeast, the pilgrims, the witch hunts, The Last of the Mohicans. If you are like me, this geography of the imagination is easily rendered. So too are the Texas territories, or the Mississippi (thanks to Twain, who’s voice and influence is evident here), or Jamestown, Williamsburg. But what of the last of the unknown territories, the last place where a “desperado” could hide, and not only hide but flourish, provided he had the sand? Can you conjure up such a pace? Perhaps it is an educational gap, of which I confess to too many, but I never considered Florida historically, short of Ponce de Leon. Now, imagine dropping into that gap a clever man of unabashed ambition and nerve, labor and resources aplenty, guns and knives with which to carry out a personal vision. Imagine too an absence of law and an abundance of whisky. This man would live here, on the Ten Thousand Islands, amid the mosquitos and crocs and snakes, off the coast of Florida, for two decades. He would turn 35 acres into a sugar cane factory, spawning an industry. He would love his wife and pay his bills on time. He would read history of ancient Greece and morn the loss of loved ones. Yet, one day he would be gunned down by his neighbors. They claimed he was a murderer who would kill his workers before payday, a man who had escaped the law in the north and the west. No one would be arraigned or tried for his murder. And the land he worked and was tied to would later become part of the Everglades park system.

If you can hold that image for simply a second you will have an inkling of the wonders at work in this novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 100 readers
PUBLISHER:	Modern Library (December 2, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Peter Matthiessen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Southern “Western” fiction” Smonk by Tom Franklin Other fiction set in 1000 Islands/Everglades: A Killing Rain by P.J. Parrish

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• Race Rock (1954)
• Partisans (1965)
• Raditzer (1961)
• At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965)
• Far Tortuga (1975)
• On the River Styx and Other Stories (1989)
• Killing Mister Watson (1990)
• Lost Man’s River (1997)
• Bone by Bone (1999)
• Shadow Country (April 2008)
• In Paradise (April 2014)

Selected Non-Fiction:

• The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961)
• Blue Meridian. The Search for the Great White Shark (1971)
• The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972)
• The Snow Leopard (1978)
• In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983)
• Nine-headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)
• Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork (1986)
• The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes (2001)

“[New York] was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. ”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Poornima Apte (JUL 15, 2009)

Just when you thought he couldn’t get any better, he does. Column McCann’s latest novel, Let the Great World Spin, is a masterpiece of seemingly disparate stories set together into one beautiful whole. The action takes place in the New York of the ‘70s specifically on one day in 1974 when Philippe Petit made his tightrope walk across the Twin Towers. Even if this is supposed to be a “New York story,” this is not a sprawling saga with detailed descriptions of time and place. Instead McCann makes the city come alive through the voices of a variety of beautifully painted characters whom he breathes into life in the novel.

McCann makes Petit’s tightrope act the pivot that holds different threads of storyline together. There is Corrigan, a monk from Dublin, whose life is narrated through the voice of his brother. Corrigan moves to New York and tries to make life a little easier for a gaggle of prostitutes all of whom end up worshipping him and his small acts of kindness. “He consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same,” Corrie’s brother writes of him.

There’s Jazzlyn, one of the prostitutes, and her mother Tillie, whose story McCann narrates in a superb clipped writing style. Down at the other end of town, on the Upper East Side, lives Claire Soderberg mourning the death of her son in Vietnam. She has had a few meetings with a support group comprised of other moms in the city who have also lost their sons to the war. Claire’s tentative and awkward friendship with a black woman from the support group, Gloria, is one of the many gorgeous pieces of writing in Let the Great World Spin. It is hard to write more about these wonderful characters without giving away their connections to each other, one of the fundamental backbones of the novel. It’s enough to say that as the book progresses, a larger (and satisfying) picture slowly emerges.

As with his earlier works, Dancer and Zoli, McCann’s writing is really poetic. For instance, when the tightrope is eventually slowly reeled in after Petit’s act, McCann likens it to “watching a child’s Etch A Sketch as the sky shook itself out: the line kept disappearing pixel by pixel.”

The singular, most striking aspect of McCann’s new novel is just how much it lacks a sense of time. The fact that it sets the action around a spectacular act in the ‘70s actually serves to accentuate this fact even more. It is striking how many of the stories in here are so timeless they could be happening today. Grieving Claire, for example, could be a shoo-in for any mother who has lost her son in America’s more recent wars. McCann, who has said he considers himself a political writer, is not shy about writing about war. “The war was about vanity,” thought Claire‘s son about Vietnam. “It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple, hate your enemy, know nothing of him.”

“I thought I knew what Vietnam was we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak,” says another character. “The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.” Sound familiar? McCann seems to be pointing this out to us: The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Except of course they didn’t. On page 237 is a picture of Petit on the rope with a plane just going past one of the World Trade Center towers. It is hard not to gasp when you see this picture. A photo is like a tiny novel, McCann has said, and this one certainly is. It speaks volumes.

The last chapter in the novel is set in 2006, five years after 9-11. It is after McCann makes this leap, that you set a sense of where we have been, how things have changed and how they have not. “A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one,” he writes. “As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart.” McCann’s expert touch lies in having the reader make this leap forward with him and fill in the gaps.

“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told,” he writes in the credits. And seeing as how McCann is on a roll, we can rest assured that he will be there for the telling. I for one, will be licking my chops and waiting.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 439 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 23, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Colum McCann
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Zoli Dancer

Bibliography:

• Fishing in the Sloe Black River: Stories (1993)
• Songdogs (1995)
• This Side of Brightness (1998)
• Everything in this Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories (2000)
• Dancer (2003)
• Zoli (2007)
• Let the Great World Spin (2009)
• TransAtlantic (June 2013)