Customer Reviews

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

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Let the Great World Spin is a novel structured as a series of mostly interesting short stories each focusing on different characters. Some of the stories overlap a great deal and some are more tangential. I enjoy short stories so I like this organizational concept as well as the overlaid theme of the tightrope walker that binds them all together.

However, a short story is a very concentrated and demanding form and is not at all forgiving of errors. The stories vary in tone, style, narrative mode, and use of language to reflect the different personalities. This makes an interesting mosaic but the quality also varies greatly so there are some stories here that succeed and some that fail. Sometimes the author even caricatures and stereotypes people and places.

The quality of the writing itself is inconsistent even within chapters. The author is obviously very skilled at choosing words and constructing interesting phrases and sentences. However, there are entire sections of chapters where the words or thoughts expressed by the characters are very unnatural or inappropriate and the reader is distracted by the clumsiness. Similarly, the author is quite capable of setting a scene and describing details effectively yet sometimes utterly fails to convince. I was surprised to learn that the author actually lives in New York City, which is the setting for most of the novel.

While the overall framework works well, there are structural problems on a smaller scale. There are bursts of sentence fragments and while they are effective in small doses, when extended or frequently repeated, they become tedious. One chapter has similar staccato bursts amplified into disjointed paragraphs and they fail in telling what is an interesting story. There are other distracting stylistic choices such as different ways of formatting dialogue, sometimes with quotes and sometimes with dashes. Sometimes the effect is of a rough draft or outline of a story rather than of a finished work.

In the end, I felt shortchanged and frustrated by the author's failure to consistently live up to great potential. These are interesting stories not always told well.