New York Adult Entertainment: Significant (Little) Moments Pulled From Obscurity
… I know, for a fact, that if she’s still around, she would not remember that,” said Mr. McCann, now 44 and speaking with a strong Irish lilt despite having lived in New York for 15 years. “But every single time I touch down in London, I can feel that woman’s presence, and also her generosity. So this tiny little moment affected me in all sorts of extraordinary ways.”
All sorts of tiny and extraordinary moments make up “Let the Great World Spin,” a polyphonic novel set in 1970s New York that also works as an allegory about resilience and recovery after Sept. 11, 2001.
In one scene a group of prostitutes dances around an old man in a wheelchair whom they have rolled into the back of a fruit-and-vegetable truck, giving him a birthday to remember. An 18-year-old computer hacker falls in love with the voice of a legal librarian, whom he hears talking on a pay phone. A radical Irish monk hangs a spoon off his nose to impress a Guatemalan nurse and her children. A white judge apologizes for being rude to a working-class African-American woman who visits his wife at their Park Avenue apartment.