Let the Great World Spin

Title: Let the Great World Spin
Author: Colum McCann
Genre: Modern Fiction
Pages (words): 400 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: In 1974, a man illegally walked a tightrope between the brand new World Trade Center Towers (that part is true).  This novel tells the story of many disparate and seemingly unconnected New Yorkers whose lives are going on around this incredible event.  Each chapter tells the story of a different character, where they came from and how they got to New York, and how their lives might have changed on that day.  Some of them witness the tightrope walker, and others miss the event completely.  But all of them, in their own way, are walking their own tightropes with no net to catch them, as the world spins around them.
Thoughts: There was a lot to like about this book.  The writing was very, very good, I thought, with clean, innovative description and really great voice.  I also thought that McCann did a cleaver job of pulling all the various stories together in a coherent, but non-contrived way.  And, while it is a bit more artistic than most books that I read, it wasn't so out there that I couldn't follow it.  On the contrary, the character sketches were each quite intriguing.  There were only two downsides for me.  First, I don't know that books about gritty side of New York are my favorites.  That's just personal taste, more than anything.  Second, the chapter about the prostitute (it's the one about Tillie) was far to seedy for me, and I ended up skipping much of it.  I think that chapter left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, and without it I would have likely bumped up the rating by another half star.  I'd recommend the book, but I you should just skip that chapter.  You can do so quite easily and it won't affect the story at all, since each chapter is about a different protagonist.
Disclaimer:  As mentioned, there is one pretty explicit chapter that I would recommend just skipping.  The rest of the book had some scattered swear words, and several chapters have prostitutes in them but do not describe anything explicitly.