Chris Barsanti

In Books:
Let the Great World Spin

The method of Colum McCann’s exciting, maddening new novel Let the Great World Spin is cinematic, like a great deal of modern fiction. The setting is New York, circa 1974, right in the midst of its slide into near-complete dysfunction. The language has a sharp-focus clarity and tendency toward the edit-montage, blocking scenes and downloading them into neatly snapped-off bits.

Here is the book’s first of several narrators, Dublin-born Ciaran, laying out the landscape as he’s being driven through the South Bronx by his younger brother Corrigan, who’s come to the city on the latest stage of his saint-like progression toward self-abnegation and sacrifice…

Let the Great World Spin is available for sale at finer book outlets across the land. You can read the full review at PopMatters.