Let The Great World Spin: Elegant, Profound, Beautiful

Better described as a literary work of art than a novel, Let The Great World Spin, is brilliant and profound — and well-deserving of its 2009 National Book Award. As life is episodic, so are the interconnected stories of a diverse cast of characters that populate this novel. An Irish Catholic monk. An African-American hooker, and her heroin-addicted daughter. A wealthy socialite named Claire grieving the loss of her son in Vietnam. A Jewish judge. Computer geeks. A guy who photographs graffiti. The novel revolves around the connections — often in unexpected ways — of these characters with the common thread of Philippe Petit's daring tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in August, 1974.

Part of the wonder of the novel is the verisimilitude with which McCann renders these characters. Endowed by their creator with beautiful, elegant, but clearly delineated voices, these New Yorkers practically spring off the page. They are so real, themselves so human. And through them, McCann offers a simple road map for being human: Connect. Love. Hope.

But the novel isn't just about the interconnectedness of people; it's about connecting with a moment, a memory, an image. As the broke-down hooker Tillie wastes away in jail, she remembers a week spent at an expensive hotel with a trick who only wanted to talk with her, respected her, practically loved her. She relies on that memory to help her navigate the vicious downward spiral of her life. Gloria, a poor black woman, who befriends the grieving mother Claire based on their shared experience of losing children to the Vietnam War, explains this idea as clearly as the English language could render it: "I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight."

This novel is also a portrait of New York City. Spanning races and classes, it's a tribute to the city's diversity, richness and history. As McCann tells us through one of his characters, "The city lived in a sort of everyday present....New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddamn about what it had left behind."  And then later, "(The tightrope walker) had made himself a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past." For that reason, Petit's walk was a "stroke of genius."

And though 9/11 is never mentioned explicitly, it's clearly the undercurrent for and possibly the impetus of this novel. As people connected based on the novelty and shared experience of Petit's walk, so also did they connect on the shared and horrific experience of the terrorist attacks on the most horrific day in American history. McCann, seemingly randomly at the time, includes a photo of "a man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building." The photo's weird trick of perspective didn't mean anything particularly interesting until 27 years after it was taken. Now, looking at it, and contemplating its prescience, you can't help but shudder.

This is a novel that I cannot leave; it really affected me. As I've written this, I've gone back and reread several of McCann's elegant passages. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but for McCann, it only takes 95 or so. He conveys images, emotions, memories in words and phrases that are just so precise. For example: "She had the bluest eyes, they looked like small drops of September sky."  How many times have you read novelists who totally flub an eye-description analogy? Not McCann — it's perfect, and that's just one of hundreds of examples throughout the novel. I can't recommend it more highly. Please read it. Please. 


GIVEAWAY WINNER
Thanks again to TLC Book Tours, who sponsored this giveaway and hosted this blog tour. Again, please click here to see the other stops on the tour and read the other reviews from the other fantastic bloggers.

I'm happy to announce that, rather poetically, random.org decided to select a New Yorker as the winner of my giveaway. Congratulations to Colleen who runs the blog Books in the City.  Thanks to everyone who entered.

Renaissance or Ridiculous: When Celebs Write Fiction

Remember that scene in the movie Boogie Nights when Dirk and Reed think that because they've been successful porn stars, they should have no trouble recording hit pop songs as well? The result, of course, is disastrously hilarious: "Feel, feel, feel, feel my heat."

A similar delusion of grandeur seems to have overtaken (or been planted in) a small but growing contingent of real-life celebrities. Because a person can act, host a reality show, or generally make a fool of oneself on television, apparently writing fiction is the next logical step? And publishers are disgorging these celebrity-penned novels to the shelves faster than Tiger Woods can issue insincere apologies. The reason why publishers see these novels as good investments is simple: They sell well. And the reasons they sell well are also simple. One: People buy things when there is a famous name attached, whether novels or nose hair clippers. Two: People are obsessed with celebrity, and many of these novels are thinly veiled memoirs.

So here are a few recent examples of novels by celebrities: Model and professional crazy lady Tyra Banks announced this week that she'd be publishing a novel titled Modelland (pronounced "Model Land," as Tyra helpfully explains) that will "touch the dreamer in all of us." Uh huh. Lauren Conrad of TV's Laguna Beach and The Hills fame has published not one, but two novels, titled L.A. Candy and Sweet Little Lies. Great titles. Brooding actor Ethan Hawke, famous for playing a spectacular wuss in just about every role he's ever taken, published a novel several years ago titled Ash Wednesday. Reviews were mixed. Singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett and cornerstone-of-the-right Newt Gingrich have also published fiction. Hell, even Pamela Anderson of sex tape and Barb Wire fame, has unleashed two novels on the world! Frightening, isn't it?

How these novels actually get published is probably more of an interesting story than the stories in the novels themselves. Does a grubby agent whisper in a celeb's ear about a new money-making "scheme"?  Does a publisher give a book deal to a celeb whose name is hot, secure a ghost writer, and then publish the novel without the celeb so much as glancing at the manuscript? (Does anyone really think Pam Anderson wrote two books?) Or does the celeb sincerely believe s/he has a story to tell that the world can't live without and dutifully pounds it out between takes or rehab stints?

Perhaps I'm being too cynical. Publishers argue that profits and sure sales from these puff pieces allow them to take chances on other less-marketable, much-more-literary books. But is that really the case? From where I'm sitting, firmly in the camp of "literary snob," it's hard to see any redeeming value whatsoever to these novels. I realize I'm not exactly going out on an idealistic limb here, and even though I understand the allure for some folks, trading on celebrity to publish crappy fiction will always boil my blood.

But, hey, let's close on a high note, because for every rule, there is an exception. And so I give you actor James Franco. Franco, who has made a career out of being exceptional, choosing widely varying roles in everything from blockbusters (Spider-Man) to little-know indies (Sonny), is publishing a book of short stories in the fall titled Palo Alto. But here's the twist: Franco has an English degree from UCLA, an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and was recently accepted into an English Ph.D program at Yale. And here's the further twist: He's actually good! Check out this story he recently published in Esquire. It's a bit messy, but I liked it! 

So, what do you think about the rash of celebrities posing as novelists? Have you read a celebrity novel that's any good?

How To Talk To A Widower: When Grief is Hilarious!

Normally if you read several books by the same author, and the main character in each of those books is pretty much the same guy, you'd be annoyed and probably scream "Unoriginal! Repetitive!"  But Jonathan Tropper manages to pull this off. How? His prose reads like a 330 pages of stand-up comedy, so you don't really mind that he doesn't spend a whole lot of time on character development. But beyond his wonderful prose, as I've mentioned before, I love reading Tropper because his stories have heart, and are just so, for lack of a better word, true.

If you've read Tropper at all, you'll easily recognize Doug Parker, our protagonist for How To Talk To A Widower, as Zack from Everything Changes and Judd from This Is Where I Leave You. He's a wise-cracking, self-deprecating dude's dude with a slightly off-kilter family and a complicated relationship with women.

In this novel, the angle is that Doug's wife Hailey, 11 years his senior, has died in a plane crash (Doug is 29). And so he's spent the last year grieving — which has limited his activity to drinking heavily, feeling sorry for himself, occasionally yelling at people who express sympathy, and writing a monthly column for a magazine about how to talk to a widower. But Doug's twin sister Claire, who has her own relationship dilemmas, convinces him that he needs to get back into the dating pool. Meanwhile, he's also charged with the care of his wife's 16-year-old son from a previous marriage, who is angry at the world, as teenagers are. Hilarity ensues.

But, again, the fun derived from this novel is directly attributable to the writing. Want some examples?  Sure, no problem: "Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's." Too low-brow?  Then this'll really make you wince: "I've never been to an OB/GYN office before, and you can almost see fractal bends in the air from all the estrogen floating around in here."

I read the last 200 pages of this novel on a plane in a feverish, barely-looking-up trance. I loved it! So if you're looking for something on the light side that'll make you laugh, think and even get a little emotional, check it out.

NYC Fiction & GIVEAWAY: Let the Great World Spin

One of my all-time favorite "sub-genres" of fiction is stories that take place in New York City. Part of the reason is that when I was growing up in a small town in Ohio dreaming of writerly fame, New York always represented sort of a paragon of sophistication and success to me. I'd always assumed that I'd be living in NY someday, and I had visions of working on my soon-to-be-published manuscript in Central Park on a sunny Sunday afternoon right before subwaying off to a meeting with my agent. While that hasn't quite yet come to fruition, the allure of the city is still there. As a Chicagoan, that idealization of New York seems almost traitorous, but I can't help it — it's one of my favorite cities in the world to visit, and I so I still love reading NYC novels.

I bring up this up now because forces have converged to make it a great time to plow through several NYC-themed novels in a row. First, I'm participating in a Let the Great World Spin blog tour, and I'm doing a giveaway in conjunction with the tour — please see details below. Last year's National Book Award winner has garnered positive review after positive review, so I'm stoked to dive in.

Secondly, I'm heading to NYC in early June for a much-needed vacation. So, between now and then, I'm also planning to read New York, by Edward Rutherfurd and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

Here is a Top 11 list of some NYC novels I've enjoyed, in order of how much I enjoyed them. It's by no means an exhaustive list, and I encourage you to read the rules of the giveaway below and add your favorites!

1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
2. Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
3. Falling Man, by Don DeLillo
4. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
5. The Believers, by Zoe Heller
6. A Fortunate Age, by Joanna Smith Rakoff
7. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud
8. The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster
9. The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris
10. All the Sad Young Literary Men, by Keith Gessen
11. Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee


Now you:  

GIVEAWAY DETAILS
I'll post my review of Let the Great World Spin on May 25th, but in the meantime, I'm giving away a copy of the book. To enter to win, please comment below and tell me which criteria you meet, and don't forget to leave an email address so I can contact you. You'll receive entries based on the following criteria:

+1 New Follower
+2 Existing Follower
+2 What's your favorite NYC novel?  


I'll announce the winner on May 25th. Thanks to Lisa and TLC Book Tours for sponsoring this giveaway and organizing the tour. For other reviews on the Let the Great World Spin tour, please click here for the schedule.

Solar: McEwan's Cynical Scientist

You won't find too many literary characters more despicable than Michael Beard, the star of Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar. Michael is the prototypical dumb smart guy — he's a capable, well-respected physicist, but he can't seem to get his personal life together, and Solar is basically a study of his (deplorable) character. When the novel opens, Michael, a serial philanderer, is trudging amidst the ruins of his failed fifth marriage and happily resting on the laurels of the Nobel Prize he won decades ago.

Solar is also a novel of ideas, to use a cliche — McEwan is an incredibly skillful writer, easing us in and out of complex scientific and philosophical notions in a way that enlivens them, keeping the reader engaged. To me, one of the more interesting parts of the novel is a discussion of why more women don't go into physics. To get to the root of this question, we see Michael, as a scientist and therefore staunch objectivist, defending his discipline against what he believes to be silly postmodernists who believe that science is only one of many possible ways of understanding the world — on par with philosophy, sociology and religion.

To relate this to climate change, Michael's opponents would say that it's just as legitimate for fundamentalist Christians to be exasperated by those who don't believe in God as it is for scientists to dismiss as idiots people who don't "believe" in climate change. Obviously, most scientists would disagree with the validity of that analogy.

Ultimately, though, this novel is about Michael. We travel with him from the Arctic to his London home to the desert of New Mexico, where he tries to develop a new solar energy technology. Ostensibly, his goal is develop a source of clean energy and save the world from climate change, which seems very admirable, but only until you realize that he's only doing it for personal fame and fortune. Throughout the story, you constantly feel bad for the people, his women especially, who are caught in Michael's misogynistic maneuverings. Even so, there are some laugh-out-loud funny parts (during his trip the Arctic, Michael stops to take a pee, and his thing gets frozen to his zipper), especially in the first few chapters as McEwan seems to realize he needs you on his side to continue telling Michael's depraved tale.

So I won't render an absolute judgment on this book, because it'll appeal to different folks. If you're turned off by a protagonist who is such a turn-off, you'll hate this book. But if you don't need likable characters to enjoy a novel, this could work. For me, the cynical view of climate change action — that the majority of those working on solutions are either greatly deluded or only doing so for personal gain — was more than a bit irritating, which is too bad, because I enjoyed the writing, the physics, and the discussions about renewable energy. I also had fun rooting for Michael to get his comeuppance.

(Also, if you are skeptical of or just cynical about climate change, you'll probably really dig this novel. It'll fit nicely on your shelf next to State of Fear, by Michael Crichton.)