They Hushed

I have been reading some incredible novels recently, but Let the Good World Spin by Colum McCann blew me away. The novel consists of four sections and twelve characters whose lives intersect and intertwine with Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. The towering characters among the twelve are Corrigan and Jazzlyn.

Corrigan is a man who gives. As a young boy, he gives his blankets and shoes to homeless people in Dublin. After his mother's death, he gives all of his father's suits to the destitute people in his neighborhood, and his father finds a whole street full of people wearing his clothes. In New York, he lives in the projects and opens his apartment to the prostitutes who turn tricks close by. They use Corrigan's apartment for the bathroom. That makes for some uncomfortable situations for Corrigan, a monk who has taken a vow of chastity. But Corrigan says, "It's not much. Just a little gesture. A place they can use." Another layer of this complicated character is revealed in his relationship with Adelita. The day after he has sex for the first time, breaking his vows, he dies in a car accident while driving Jazzlyn home after she has been arrested for prostitution and robbery. The one time he takes from another instead of giving, he loses his life.

Jazzlyn is a woman who is taken. As a young girl, Jazz is taken from her mother, Tillie, when she is four. When Jazz returns to her mother, her innocence is taken and she walks in her mother's footsteps. Corrigan tries to give Jazzlyn some hope, promising to give her a castle, but she's seen too much, done too much heroin - she lives in "the house that horse built" - and given up too much of herself to people who use her for their personal pleasure.

The reader learns about Corrigan and Jazzlyn through the ten other characters, but mostly from the people closest to them: Corrigan's brother and Jazzlyn's mother. Even the accident that kills Corrie and Jazz is related by other characters who cause and observe the accident. It reads as a choreographed dance - the nudge, the skid, the slow spin, the contact with the guard rail. The reader watches both characters, all the characters, walk a tightrope. They teeter between helplessly flailing through the air or carefully placing each foot on the wire. I loved Corrigan and pitied Jazzlyn. I cared about these characters. I didn't want the novel to end.