Colum McCann

Fiction 2009| 350 pages

The through-line in this novel is delightful! Periodically we see our focus ... a tightrope walker who strings a cable between the top floors of the Twin Towers (back when they still stood) and walks, dances, and hops back and forth between the buildings.  (A true story from August 7, 1974).  Sadly, this delightful story is only about 50 pages of the book.

The rest of the novel is about various people who watch him, or hear about him, or know someone who was watching him.  I have no problem with this format. It is clear who the people are, and McCann does a good job of bringing them together, with characters and relatives of characters appearing and reappearing in a variety of vignettes.  And his writing is superb; beautiful in fact.

So, why is this a two-heart book?  What I really dislike about this book is the content itself. Nearly all of the vignettes are depressing and include violence and sometimes death.  All of them are connected in some way to sex workers, which in and of itself is not depressing, however, he represents the poorest of the poor, the addicted, the depressed, the sad, the downtrodden people and buildings in NYC.  The novel is gritty, challenging, and often desperate.  Too much grit for me right now.

This is our book club book for this month, so I reserve the right to change/shift my mind after our discussion!  In the meantime, I suggest you look elsewhere.

May 2025