Arts Lives – Colum McCann: ‘Becoming a New Yorker’

I watched this documentary on RTE last night (you can watch it via this link here). I can’t resist anything shot in New York. They could make a documentary about pebbles or dust or nails and I would watch it if it was shot in New York. The place has a magical hold on me.

But hopefully that doesn’t suggest I am without some sense of quality control. There were other reasons to watch this programme. Principally, for anyone lucky enough to have read McCann’s superb novel Let the Great World Spin, the film was a welcome revisit to the world that inspired that book.

Standing on the Brooklyn Bridge looking back at the island of Manhattan, McCann described how that heavy urban landscape freaked him out when he went there first. But it was imagining the intimate minutiae of human life taking place in the basements, behind the windows, on the corners of that teeming city that provided him with inspiration. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the essence of what he said. It makes sense of his work.

He says of himself that his own life (happily married, happy upbringing in Dublin, lives on ‘posh’ Upper East Side in a nice, though unostentatious, apartment with wife and three kids) is not something that he would want to read about. So his work is an always a leap of imagination, though in fairness, backed up with meticulous research.

One of his earlier novels (The Side of Brightness - 1998) was inspired by the homeless people he encountered living in the tunnels of the New York subway system; a micro city that provided shelter, warmth and a hiding place for thousands of displaced and forgaotten people.

Dancer, another acclaimed novel, is an imagined life story of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, which portrays the dancer’s life on the journey between post war Russia and the decadence of 1970s New York nightlife (‘a time before excess was tragic’) as he puts it.

I haven’t yet read his other novels, but I will. McCann seems to excel at rendering these imagined lives in loving detail. The characters in Let the Great World Spin had me hypnotised. As each of their stories concluded I missed them, I ached for them. I could see their eye colour, touch their skin, smell their breath. As real and as intimate as you could be in the presence of the printed word. It is truly a beautiful novel, and I cannot remember the last time a book took hold of me like that.

As it happens, just after I finished reading it in January, I immediately picked up The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen which I really enjoyed, but for much of the time I was reading it I struggled to leave Let the Great World Spin behind. I know I will have to read it again.

Without question, McCann is a writer whose work warrants close attention, respect, but above all, affection.

Colum McCann’s Wikipedia entry and official website.