For McCann, the emblematic New Yorker is homo faber: man (and woman) as laboring artisan, trying to assert a sense of individuality amid the crush of the modern world. In the swirling mesh of stories that attempt to configure his empire city as myth and amid too much exalted writing - with moments of acute pungency - five working lives are this novel’s arrestingly specific achievement.
They belong to a worker priest, a streetwalker, a criminal court judge, and a wire-walker. The fifth is a struggling black mother - because McCann endows motherhood with both the squalor of the streetwalker and the flight of the aerialist.
“Let the Great World Spin’’ is a set of larger and smaller stories that approach, intersect, and diverge. Mainly they coincide with the twin towers walk, though some begin earlier and extend decades afterward.
Corrigan, the priest, lives sacrificially in the South Bronx, where he tends a flock of streetwalkers who service passing truck drivers. The details of his dangerous ministry are vividly set down. Beaten and eventually tolerated by their pimps, he lets the women wash up in his bathroom, brings them coffee, goes with them to court.
His devotion to the downtrodden, though, is marked by a kind of rancid saintliness. As his brother Ciaran observes: “Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own.’’ McCann’s portrait of a tormented priest has echoes of Georges Bernanos and Graham Greene, but there is something too facile, even kitschy in its depiction of the edge on which he teeters.
Tillie, a middle-aged streetwalker, gives an enthrallingly lively account of her life, first as a high-priced young prostitute in posh East Side hotels, and later, as her looks go, among the truck drivers in the South Bronx.
