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. 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.).
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