On the back jacket of Let the Great World Spin, it says “a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day.” Even my beloved Dave Eggers says “There’s so much passion and humor and pure life force on every page that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”
Call me underwhelmed.
Here’s the basic plot. A tightrope walker strings a high wire between the top floors of the World Trade Center and walks across, enthralling the entire city. Also happening that day, a support group of mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam meet at a Park Avenue penthouse. Some hookers from the Bronx get arrested. A monk abandons his order to finally sleep with a woman he’s fallen in love with, only to die later that day in a car accident. And of course, all these stories are interrelated – one of the hookers is with the monk at the time of the crash. One of the support group moms ends up adopting her children. Another mom is married to the judge who hears the tightrope walker’s case.
But Joycean? Just because events are told out of order and from different points of view doesn’t make you Joyce. It makes you a mimic.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the post-modern version of the non-linear narrative. I really liked Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is one of my favorite books of all time. I even like non-linear narrative in film, ably pioneered by Quentin Tarrantino in Pulp Fiction and perfected by Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia. But, note to authors out there everywhere…THESE BOOKS AND FILMS ARE DECADES OLD. IT’S PLAYED OUT NOW.
If everyone is telling stories in the non-linear fashion, it’s not fresh, innovative or pioneering. It’s boring and predictable. Tarrantino walked away from the style about a decade ago after the Jackie Brown disaster. In fact, the only filmmaker still clinging to the style is Christopher Nolan, but at least he put his spin on Memento by telling the story backward to create the non-linear feel without the story actually taking on non-linear form. That’s inventive. Just rehashing a style without adding a creative take on the genre is not.
