Fiction Mondays: Let the Great World Spin

This week, I've been reading Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," which is not a story about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. That event is central to the book--the story opens with a large crowd watching his walk on an August morning in 1974--but the novel itself is about a large cast of characters who witness the event. I'm not very far into it at this point, but it's beautiful. I think it's supposed to be read slowly, because the language in every sentence is so well-chosen, so perfectly constructed, that you want to make sure you take every word in.

Since I'm not very far in, I'm not going to talk much about the plot other than to say the opening section, about a religious man named Corrigan struggling for his soul when he moves to New York, is one of the most interesting character studies I've read in a long time. It's narrated by Corrigan's brother, who finds himself in a Bronx tenement, surrounded by prostitutes, thugs, and addicts, and is incredibly compelling. There's something I've noticed about Irish authors, though: instead of quotation marks, they use dashes to denote speech. Not in the first section (I think because it's a flashback), but later on. This is something I noticed when I read Roddy Doyle, and seeing it again made me wonder where it started. I cracked open "Ulysses" and saw that Joyce uses dashes as well, but was he the first? Did Irish authors pick this up as a kind of tribute to Joyce? This was how he did it, so this is how Irish writers do it? I'd be interested to know.

I picked up two books after Christmas, this one and Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project," both of which I've been meaning to check out for some time. Oddly enough, these two writers have an excellent conversation in the new issue of the Believer. Check it out here. They talk about art, about the role of literature, and about something I've been wondering about: what happened to literary feuds? I mean the real, fisticuffs kind of feud. Like Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. It reminded me of my favorite part of "The Savage Detectives," when Arturo Belano challenges a critic to a duel on the beach--where is that passion anymore?

Related to this book, I also watched "Man on Wire," the documentary about that same walk, Saturday night. I think this week's "Friday Films" will be about it, which makes this something of a theme week. The only question is: is there a song about this event? Maybe Wednesday will be a mini-essay on the Decemberists' "The Gymnast, High Above the Ground."