What happens when you take a dozen lives that have no business intersecting and thread them all through the eye of one impossible needle — a man on a wire between the Twin Towers?
I've been circling this book for years. It sat on my "I'll get to it" shelf the way Middlemarch sat there before I finally listened to it during a particularly brutal budget meeting. But Let the Great World Spin found me at the right moment — late August, Chicago humidity thick enough to chew, walking the lakefront with Denise while the city did its golden-hour thing over the water. And something about McCann's 1970s New York, all grit and grief and stubborn beauty, matched that light perfectly.
A Wire Strung Between Grief and Grace
Here's what McCann is really saying with this book: connection isn't optional. It's physics. You can't throw a stone into a pond without the ripples hitting every shore. The tightrope walk — Philippe Petit's real-life stunt between the towers in August 1974 — is the stone. But McCann barely gives the walker himself any oxygen. Instead, he's down in the streets, in the Bronx with Corrigan, this wild-hearted Irish monk who can't stop loving people even when it's literally killing him. He's in a Park Avenue living room where mothers who lost sons in Vietnam try to find common ground and keep tripping over class and race. He's in a courtroom with Judge Soderberg, a man trying to hold justice together while his own interior life is quietly falling apart.
The structure is braided — each chapter shifts perspective, shifts voice, shifts decade even, until you realize everyone in this book is connected by one catastrophic car accident involving Jazzlyn Henderson, a young woman turning tricks alongside her own mother Tillie. That accident scene hits like a physical blow. I actually stopped walking. Denise asked if I was okay. I wasn't, really.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing — that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. McCann shows you one-eighth of each life and trusts you to feel the rest. The prose deserves to be savored. His sentences do this thing where they'll run long, accumulating images like a camera panning slowly across a room, and then he'll stop you cold with something short and devastating. My students would hate this. I love it.
Five Voices, Uneven Footing
The audiobook uses a full cast — Richard Poe, Gerard Doyle, Carol Monda, Johanna Parker, Ramon De Ocampo — and the idea is sound. Each narrator takes different chapters, different perspectives. Gerard Doyle handles the Irish sections with an authenticity that makes Corrigan's faith and doubt feel lived-in rather than literary. His lilt carries real weight, especially in the early Bronx chapters where Corrigan is walking among people the city has forgotten. Carol Monda brings something genuinely tender to Claire's grief — the Park Avenue mother whose loss is no less real for being cushioned by wealth.
But here's where I have to be honest: the performances aren't all operating at the same altitude. Some chapters — particularly the slower, more interior passages — drag under narration that doesn't quite find the rhythm McCann's prose demands. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation, but not all five narrators understand it equally. There are stretches where I felt the energy dip, where I could sense the performance becoming dutiful rather than inhabited. The Tillie sections, which on the page must crackle with profane defiance, sometimes flatten out. And yes, there's a lot of raw language in this book — McCann isn't shy about it. Some listeners find that off-putting. I didn't, but I teach high school in Chicago. My threshold is professionally calibrated.
At 15 hours, this is a commitment. The pacing mirrors the book's structure — episodic, sometimes languorous, occasionally electric. It rewards patience. It does not reward multitasking. I tried grading papers during the Soderberg courtroom chapter and had to rewind twice because McCann was doing something structurally clever that I completely missed while marking comma splices.
Who Should Walk This Wire
If you loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or A Visit from the Goon Squad, this is their spiritual successor — that same ambition to capture an entire city through individual lives, that same faith that small stories contain enormous ones. If you need plot momentum, if you want a single protagonist pulling you forward, you'll struggle. This is a novel that asks you to hold seven or eight stories in your head simultaneously and trust that they'll converge. They do. Beautifully.
But the audiobook version specifically? It's good. Not great. The multi-narrator approach works conceptually but the execution is uneven enough that I'd say read the print if you can, listen if you can't. The strongest performances — Doyle, Monda — are worth the price of admission. The weaker ones are the tax you pay. Uneven execution across a cast is something I ran into with Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven too — different chapters finding different gears, some narrators locking in while others just sort of showed up.
The Lesson Plan I'd Never Assign
I'll never teach this book. It's too long for a semester, too profane for a permission slip, and my students would riot at the nonlinear structure. But if I could? I'd want them to sit with that final section, where McCann pulls the camera back decades and shows you where all these lives ended up, and I'd want them to understand that every stranger on the street is carrying a novel's worth of story. That's what the tightrope walk really means in this book — not the spectacle, but the fact that an entire city stopped and looked up together. For one moment, they shared the same sky.
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. Definitely.
