33 pages 1 hour read

Let the Great World Spin

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009

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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book Two

Chapter 4 Summary: Tag

This is the shortest chapter. It captures a moment in urban history when graffiti artists ruled pop culture. The young photographer Fernando Marcano knows instinctively what is happening and how creative and adventurous the tag artists can be. He records their work, especially from subway cars moving through the tunnels. In the end, McCann uses the young man to create an iconic image of the tightrope walker that appears on page 237. McCann uses an actual photograph from the event, but Fernando is fictional.

Chapter 5 Summary: Etherwest

This chapter gives a new and different perspective on the tightrope walker’s performance. There are three computer hackers in California who follow the events by finding phone numbers with their computers. Then they get two New Yorkers, including a secretary at a Wall Street law firm, to describe what is happening in real time.  

Chapter 6 Summary: This Is the House that Horse Built

This intense chapter records Tillie’s stream of consciousness as she experiences life in jail. Her daughter is dead, she is facing imprisonment upstate, and her granddaughters have been placed outside her family. Tillie is miserable, regretful, and guilty. She reviews her life and feels especially bad about letting her daughter get involved in drugs and prostitution. Tillie thinks often of suicide. 

 

At the end of the chapter Tillie commits suicide. “I’d say good-bye, except I don’t know who to say it to. . . . Here I come, Jazzlyn [her dead daughter], it’s me. I got a knuckle-duster in my sock.”

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

McCann expands his canvas in the middle of the book. Fernando is an accidental witness to the tightrope walker event. However, his fascination with graffiti art helps define the time and place of the novel. Fernando’s trips on subway trains photographing tags place the story squarely in New York City in the 1970s.

 

In this chapter, McCann also appeals to the sense of sight in a special way. Fernando is not just a witness and a graffiti-lover. He is a photographer who sees and records real life and creates lasting images. 

 

In Chapter 5, the computer hackers in California are much too far away to see the events in New York directly and with their own eyes. They must rely on their phone connections to tell them what is happening and process the information not with their sight, but with their hearing.  

 

McCann skillfully contrasts Fernando’s firsthand witness with what the young men receive in California from Sable’s second-person descriptions. He is pointing out what distance computers create between life and experience. In the novel, it is 1974, before such issues became mainstream. In 2009, when McCann published his book, many people are concerned about whether the disconnects between people are created and intensified by electronic communication and social media.  Are we in truly in touch with reality or do we only experience virtual reality through media?

 

In Chapter 6, McCann takes us inside Tillie’s head to read her thoughts as she reviews her life and contemplates ending it all.  Tillie has worked as a prostitute for many years. She did have one satisfying interlude with a man who, among other things, introduced her to the poetry of Rumi. Rumi was a Middle Eastern writer and a mystic who practiced the Sufi branch of Islamic religion.

 

Tillie has had no family other than her daughter and her two granddaughters, who are still very young at this point in the novel. Tillie has lived a hard life suffering much abuse, especially from pimps. She regrets having allowed her only child, Jazzlyn, to become a drug-addicted prostitute. 

 

Tillie is facing a prison sentence, having taken the blame for the robbery to keep Jazzlyn out of jail. This is her most heroic act of self-sacrifice. Yet, she still feels great guilt. The guilt is so overwhelming that it ultimately leads to her death.

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