Two of Corrigan’s prostitute flock, Jazzlyn and her mother Tillie, are picked up on an outstanding warrant, and he accompanies them to their arraignment in Solomon’s courtroom, where the newly arrested sky-walker is among those waiting to plead. With much trepidation, she hosts the group-including Gloria, Corrigan’s neighbor and the only African-American member-at her Park Avenue penthouse. Claire, heiress wife of Solomon, a judge at the “Shithouse” (Manhattan criminal court), has joined a support group of bereaved mothers whose sons died in the Vietnam War. Corrigan chastely yearns for Adelita, his co-worker at a nursing home.
Ciaran has come from Dublin to the Bronx to rescue his brother Corrigan, a monk whose ministry involves providing shelter and respite to an impromptu congregation of freeway underpass hookers. On the day that “the tightrope walker” (never named, but obviously modeled on Philippe Petit) strolls between the Twin Towers, other New Yorkers are performing quieter acts of courage. Told by a succession of narrators representing diverse social strata, the novel recalls Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), except that where Bonfire was deeply cynical about Reagan-era New York, McCann’s take on the grittier, 1970s city is deadly earnest. Long Island and New Jersey.The famous 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers is a central motif in this unwieldy paean to the adopted city of Dublin-born McCann ( Zoli, 2007, etc.). It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past.
It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. “One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days.
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