New York Adult Entertainment: Review: ‘Great World’ Sets History in Fine Balance
His characters include a Park Avenue matron whose son has been killed in Vietnam, a radical Irish monk and the Bronx prostitutes he befriends, including a mother-daughter team.
Their lives intersect in surprising yet believable ways. One character, who helps people out in disasters, likes the moment when her clients “find some meaning that sideswipes them.”
McCann, a native of Ireland who teaches at New York’s Hunter College, sideswipes readers with language.
The Park Avenue matron meets with other women who have lost sons in Vietnam and comes to “a sort of deep understanding. She sees it in their faces. Quieter than rain. Quieter than leaves.”
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McCann writes of one of his characters, the daughter and granddaughter of prostitutes: “She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn’t interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world.”