Heartbreaking

I love almost everything Colum McCann has written, so I was surprised at my frustration with Let the Great World Spin (2009).

How do I not love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. 1. It does not live up to McCann's own standards—does not have the inherent empathy of Everything in This Country Must (2001) or the inventive vitality of Dancer (2003).

2. 2. Its romanticized two-dimensional, cutout characters (troubled priest, cheerful prostitute, wealthy matron, ineffectual judge, single black mother) strut and fret their hour on an unconvincing stage.

3. 3. Its "plot" is overtly manipulated; its almanac details—pull rings on Coke cans, dimes in the jukebox, A-line dresses—seem meant to provide what W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan called "merely corroborative detail." One should not want to play "gotcha" with a novel, but instead willingly enter its spinning world.

4. 4. Its "message" remains obscure. Eight years after 9/11, it's impossible to read the opening image—the figure of a man modeled on Philippe Petit walking a tightrope between the unfinished Twin Towers—without thinking surely this stunt/ spectacle will comment indirectly on post-9/11 America. McCann claims to be "more interested in those…walking the tightrope on the ground," but by juxtaposing Petit's deliberate risk taking with lives lost in Vietnam, he belabors a flimsy point. The book knows neither the New York City of 1974 nor the underlying nature of our national grief: our loss of innocence.

5. 5. And then, there's the poetry! The book crackles like a literary scavenger hunt as McCann drops line after increasingly annoying quoted line. Despite reviews that hail the novel as a "heartbreaking symphony," my heart only breaks because it falls apart; the center cannot hold.