Spinning and Spinning

I'm reading two interesting novels, with similarly grand visions in terms of their subject matter and their style of storytelling: Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North. These novels are imbued with such passion and inventiveness, one can't help but feel that these authors were on fire to tell these stories the whole time they wrote them.

In fact, that relates closely to one of my leading criteria when I'm assessing whether a novel is any good: is this story dying to be told? A panoramic exploration of New York City in August 1974, when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were linked by a genius-madman's high-wire walk for one brief moment, is the divine subject matter of Let the Great World Spin. Colum McCann's reach in this novel is breathtaking; where he falls short for me is in the development of his characters, but he works so hard at developing so many different characters that I can't fault him too much for this. In the end, though, the New York that he describes grows a bit tiring. I don't know why this is, yet, but I'll think about that as I finish the novel.

If the focal point of McCann's novel is one high-wire act, Urrea draws inspiration from one well-known movie, to write the story of a crazy-beautiful group of Mexicans and their semi-tragic, semi-triumphant effort to cross the border in hopes of bringing back seven men to save their dying Mexican village. The whole escapade was launched after a viewing of The Magnificent Seven, and Urrea does a great job of making this improbable adventure seem real. What I find lacking in the novel, as in McCann's story, has to do with character development: the central figure, Nayeli, is an interesting person but too predictable: she has a wicked karate kick, a beautiful figure and smile, and a strong desire to "rescue" her village and, coincidentally, bring eligible bachelors back to it (since they've all left to work in the United States); other than these general characteristics, we don't really know much about her (though I'm only two-thirds of the way through and maybe something more is revealed by the end of it).

What's fascinating about both these novels--a quality that's rare these days--is the acute relevance of what they're talking about. We all felt the pain of 9/11, but beyond that--we all sensed that the fall of the Twin Towers touched the lives of New Yorkers in mysterious ways that the average American citizen could only begin to understand--this novel explores that mystery more profoundly than any other I've read. Similarly: we all understand that the immigrants working all around us in the United States are in many ways the absolute bedrock of what this country is and will become in the near future, yet their lives remain largely invisible to us (not to mention, the towns they came from).

I love the fact that both these authors aimed very high in their novels. I wish more writers would take similar leaps into the very familiar yet hidden worlds of our collective immediate past.