Into Thin Air

The first page of Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann took my breath away, putting me back in New York City in the 70’s when I arrived for graduate school and found myself enthralled and seduced by sudden surprises at every corner. It opens in the early morning 1974 at the Twin Towers. New Yorkers are rushing to work until someone looks up, gasps, and stops: almost against their will, the rushing commuters come to a halt and peer up at the improbable. Suddenly I am there too, feeling dizzy and unsure of my eyes, not believing a tiny figure is stepping out into the air near the top of one tower. My stomach plunges with the fall that I know will come. It is the tightrope walker. Up in the improbable sky.

I immediately fell in love with the book, in love with how it exploded with that dizzying feeling of never knowing what amazing thing might happen next, that feeling of unpredictable life all around you that is New York City and the world. I couldn’t remember how the real event ended, so I read quickly, afraid—like the crowd on the street—to find out: will he fall? Or live?

I turned the page and fell, with dizzying confusion, into the lives of two Irish brothers who have reunited in the deadly, weed-filled streets and abandoned buildings of the Bronx. My head hurt; this was too confusing. I nearly put the book back on the shelf, so annoyed was I that the tightrope man was gone and instead I had this, another New York that I knew only too well from years of working there, the New York in which people who had fallen or were pushed off of their own tightropes tried to keep life going on such barren ground. But I kept reading, because the Bronx, those brothers and the people trying just to live, were all so real that I had to know if they too would survive.

And it went on like that, story after story, until I started to think that the book is about each of us—sometimes daring, sometimes sorrowful—walking out into the universe. That this novel starts at the World Trade Center over three decades before it became the center of all of our fears seems like no accident: since 9/11 we are all walking out into air, taking our chances in a world in which it seems that we could suddenly disappear by losing focus or by being pushed from behind.

Each of these stories is hard to like at first simply because it means leaving behind a story that we loved. But eventually they all do come back, connecting with each other in the past or the future, and even the tightrope-walking man is there, the wires crossing and crossing again. McCann captures the voice of each person with such raw perfection that I never wanted the book to stop.

Some of my own deepest memories were torn open as I read, all of them so full of human life that they hurt. I saw my own brave brother, at 7, dressed in a bathrobe and carrying a baseball bat, out in the alley next to my bedroom in the middle of the night, having gone there to ease my 6-year-old fears of a bad guy at my window. Even now, I see his sweet face staring in through my screen, whispering softly, “See? It’s all OK out here.” The lonely old homeless woman outside the library as we waited together for it to open, telling me about escaping from Nazi Germany on foot, leaving behind every treasure and losing her family along the way. And the Bronx Irish nurse, who was put in a foster home after being raped and impregnated by her stepfather at 15, who managed, almost unbelievably, to finish school and have three wonderful children whose happy lives filled her with terrible envy, and great joy. All this beauty and heartache rushed into the space that this book created inside me. Be ready: Let The Great World Spin may overwhelm with feelings, but it will also remind you that life lurks around every corner, making you want to take chances at being alive.

And then you can pick up One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a small book that begins with people trapped in a passport office after an earthquake. This is not a survival tale. Instead, we are treated to the stories the trapped people tell each other to fight panic—one story of an amazing happening in each person’s life. Divakaruni, whom I first came to know in the wonderful Queen of Dreams and The Mistress of Spices, has now written a different kind of book. Here, she slowly and carefully unravels the multiple stories held inside strangers and lets us watch them as they give in to each other’s lives. We all can relate to fears of being trapped, but who would guess that they, and we now there with them, would become lost in stories that cross from San Francisco to India, so enthralled that we would almost forget to be afraid? Divakaruni’s quiet voice seduces us, shows us each life unwrapping, although reluctantly. Each story lets us see the pain and perhaps the one amazing thing that we all possess.

When you finish these wonderful stories, you might go out into our own streets and find a few of the strangers who seem so different from us. And find out their stories, their own steps out over the void, their one amazing thing. After all, that is really what being alive is about: not just peace and safety but taking chances, walking on out into thin air.

Sheila Coonerty, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice as well as for Santa Cruz city schools. When not working, she is writing about her post-polio adventure while learning new ways to walk, to breathe, and to live.