It took me a while but I finally finished this book. It started a bit slow for me but I came to like it very much. The interweaving of many characters and the storylines that never quite wrap up or even advance the plot — I really liked this approach and thought it was a nice metaphor for the world and New York City specifically (and in the context of this being a book indirectly about 9/11). Things don’t always need to be neatly packaged and McCann acknowledges that he wrote this novel without any map, letting it just unfold. In reading the interview in the back of the book, I liked some of the things he said:
“…I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair”
“I don’t want to write about myself. If I wrote about myself it would be a book about me sitting on my arse in a New York apartment, a middle-class white man with a wonderful wife and three fabulous children. But as Montaigne says, ‘Happiness writes white.’ It doesn’t hit the page. So we have to search elsewhere.”
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