Heartbreaking

Heartbreaking

Judith Kitchen

Pacific Lutheran University

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) It does not live up to McCann’s own standards—does not have the inherent em-pathy of Everything in This Country Must

(2001) or the inventive vitality of Dancer

(2003).

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

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 corrobora-tive detail.” One should not want to play “gotcha” with a novel, but instead willingly enter its spinning world.

4) Its “message” remains obscure. Eight years after 9/11, it’s impossible to read the opening image—the

figure of a man mod-eled on Philippe Petit walking a tightrope between the unfin-ished Twin Tow-ers—without think-ing surely this stunt/ spectacle will com-ment indirectly on post-9/11 America. McCann claims to

be “more interested in those…walking the tightrope on the ground,” but by juxtapos-ing 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) And then, there’s the poetry! The book crackles like a literary scavenger hunt as Mc-Cann 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.




Gatsby

Tom LeClair

The University of Cincinnati

If badness is related to perceived greatness, then I offer The Great Gatsby (1925) as the worst novel in American literature. I haven’t read it for many years, since the only time I used it in a Modern American Fiction class, but I remember it as incredibly smug about its relationship to the traditional realistic novel. While Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and others were taking chances, F. Scott Fitzgerald was manipulating conventions to create a book that would be “charming.” One could blame Nick the narrator, but I think Fitzgerald is respon-sible. I turned to Tender Is the Night (1934), usually considered a bad book, to give students a Fitzgerald with more aesthetic courage and, for all that novel’s sentimentality, more profundity about money and marriage.