August/September Book Club Choices

I am hosting this month's book club. Here are the books from which you will choose: The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton; Joy in the Morning, by Betty Smith (who wrote one of my favorite books of all time, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn); Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks (nothing says summer reading like a book about the plague); Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster; and Diamond Ruby, by Joseph Wallace (based on the true story of Jackie Mitchell, a woman pitcher who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a single game, and was promptly prohibited from playing baseball by the baseball commissioner (isn't that a surprise?).

Email your vote to me at kzmclain@comcast.net by Tuesday, August 3.

Let the Great World Spin

Everyone has a story. I believe one could pull aside any checker at Walmart, for example, talk to them for a bit, and find that there is something remarkably interesting about their life.

This book seems to indicate the author agrees with me. However, I have mixed feelings about the way he presents his characters and their lives to his readers. Sometimes I literally couldn’t put the book down; other times I would toss the book on the bed and think, “What in the hell is he talking about?” Overall, I found Let the Great World Spin to be a good read.

One of my favorite things about the book was the way he presented the characters one at a time, and then eventually weaved them all together in the courtroom. For the most part, I found his characters interesting. The author, however, only gave a one-dimensional blip about each character – just enough to grab my interest. I would have loved to know the characters better. For example, we learn that Lara and Ciaran end up together, but how did that come about? What did Lara ever see in her weird and self-centered boyfriend ? What made her suggest they leave the scene of the accident, and then be so unable to forgive herself?

In an interview in the back of the copy of the book I read, the author says that the book became more about ordinary people on the street walking a tightrope just one inch off the ground. Which character and situation touched you the most as an ordinary person walking a tightrope one inch off the ground? The character for whom I had the most sympathy was Claire, whose loss of her son broke my heart. But my favorite character was Gloria, whose ability to love was endless.

Tying all of these stories to the tightrope walker in 1974 was creative, I thought. It seemed significant that the author used this particular true-life incident as his central theme because the World Trade Centers have become so symbolic to us of how we are all tied together as Americans. In the same interview, the author says he was very affected by 9/11. He stated that the only way to shake the dust off from that day was to go backwards to different points of innocence. He went back to 1974 to explore war (Claire/Joshua) and art (Lara), liberation theology (Corrigan), and issues of technology (phone phreakers – and goodness gracious, what was up with them?). McCann says that for him, the towers got built back up when the two little girls got rescued by strangers. Using that same imagery, the towers got rebuilt up for me when, following her mugging, Gloria took the cab back to Claire, who so desperately needed her friendship. Was there a time or story in the book when the towers got built back up for you?

McCann says that Corrigan is the first character who came to him when writing this book and that he is the one who introduced him to all of the other characters. He says that he was sad when Corrigan died and there were times when he wanted to roll back the stone and apologize to him. I really liked Corrigan as a character, but he was a puzzle to me. While he clearly used his role as a priest, or a brother, or a monk, or whatever he was, to help those who really needed his help, I never understood why he became a member of a religious order. I didn’t ever get a sense that he became a priest (or whatever he was) because he had an extraordinary love of God. His need to care for those around him almost seemed painful. And his death so early in the book really took me by surprise. Could you tell that Corrigan played an important role in the novel for the author by the way he presented him?

Finally, can someone (perhaps an English teacher?) explain to me why the author chose to use dashes instead of quotation marks, ala Cry, the Beloved Country? And even more confusing, why did he do that for most of the book, but in a couple of instances, use quotation marks? Yikes. That made my head explode.

Overall, I would give the book a 7 or 8 out of 10, for the interesting characters, the strong sense of place (the Bronx in the 70s) and the interesting way in which the author tied it all together in the end.