Let the Great World Spin v. Miles From Nowhere
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OPENING ROUND
Let the Great World Spin
v. Miles From Nowhere
Judged by Rosecrans Baldwin
Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of TMN. His first novel, You Lost Me There, will be published in August 2010 by Riverhead Books. Known connections to this year’s contenders: ”Nami Mun, Marlon James, and I share a publisher, and I once tried to rent Wells Tower’s house.”
First, let me get some caveats out of the way. Since my co-editor Andrew and I are judging in the first round this year (in past years we’ve judged the Zombie Round), I want to say that I wasn’t involved in laying out this year’s brackets—that task was left up to the seeders. So I didn’t play a part in putting these two books together, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Nami Mun’s Miles From Nowhere, even though they’re both about New York—and now having read them, I’d say it’s a pretty great pairing.
Also, I didn’t know anything about either of the books beforehand, except that McCann’s book won the National Book Award and Mun’s was shortlisted for a prize named after a fruit—which isn’t to slag it, it’s just what I remembered. Hosts of tournaments bearing cocks don’t get to throw stones.
I also hadn’t read either author before, don’t know them personally, and I didn’t know anything about the books’ plots. Mun and I share a publisher, but nobody there in common, and we’ve never met.
I’d seen both books in my local shops and loved the covers, but that’s all I knew.
Anyway, I went into the match nude and open-minded and free, and wham—I really enjoyed reading both books, especially as a pair. As New York City books, they share neighborhoods, and as novels they show similarities in structure and manner. But they differ in scale and cohesion, and what, in the end, they pull off.
Miles From Nowhere follows one young woman very closely: 13-year-old Joon leaves a bad home and wrecked family to be various things in New York: homeless, an Avon lady, a criminal, a drug addict, a recovering drug addict, a hostess, a drunk, and lots more.
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Let the Great World Spin watches many people, both distantly and from inside their heads: an Upper East Side lady who lunches; a group of prostitutes and the priest who loves them; two artists in a vintage Pontiac Landau; and most importantly Philippe Petit, who strung a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974 and ties all the characters together.
In Miles From Nowhere, Joon is callous and frank in the dark—it gets very dark—but Mun gives her deep reserves and plays it cool and soft. Mun observes things so strikingly at times, I thought she was channeling Mitch Hedberg. And I loved that pity didn’t play a part. Even when Joon’s fate seems doomed, Mun’s narrative is tight, subdued, and startling. The only dirt is in the plot; her sentences are consistently polished light and clean.
Sometimes, though, clean can be off-putting. Around halfway through Miles From Nowhere, those light sentences were just a little too whittled (for my tastes). Also, there was a nagging feeling at the same time that any chapter in the book could have been successfully published on its own as a short; that each chapter was more devoted to itself than to the book.
I love short stories, but I wanted that knocked-out feeling I get when a great, cohesive novel shuts down.
I greatly enjoyed Miles From Nowhere from start to finish, but after a dozen pages with Let the Great World Spin, I knew which book would win. McCann’s written a monster: It wants to consume the Earth whole while naming every molecule on the way down. It’s a blast. My criticism would focus on the ending segments of the book, from “Centavos” on, when I felt it teetering on its supports—when for me the book’s world finally started to wobble, and I wasn’t convinced that the accounts being added were taking the book’s questions further rather than repeating things I’d already heard—but my metaphors are jumbling up and I’ll leave that for other judges to ascertain.
Let the Great World Spin wins.
Advancing:
Let the Great World Spin
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: In previous years, our TMN brain trust, editors Baldwin and Womack, manned the gates of the Zombie Round, the last barrier between the books and the finals, but this year, we’ve mixed it up, giving the boys a couple of opening round matchups which is sure to change the tourney in impossible to predict ways, sort of like casting Crispin Glover in your movie.
Kevin: It has been a quirk of the tourney that Rosecrans and Andrew have been, until this year, the Vinz Clortho and Zuul of the final round, and so every book that has so far displayed the coveted gold-foil Rooster sticker on its cover has reflected their sensibilities to one degree or another. I applaud the decision to change things up this year. As Angel Cabrera reminds us, the Masters will still be the Masters without Tiger, and the Rooster will still be the Rooster without Rosecrans cruelly snatching away some young author’s late-round dreams of victory.
John: I thought both Let the Great World Spin and Miles From Nowhere were very very good. Miles From Nowhere was reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a series of linked stories, not working a continuous plot, but nonetheless, driving us toward a satisfying conclusion, only substitute a Korean teenage runaway for Johnson’s smacked-out Fuckhead. For all the bleakness of the events, it never wallows, and never goes begging for sympathy and is often funny. (A lot like Jesus’ Son.) I read it over the course of a Sunday, ignoring seemingly more important things, like napping or catching up with episodes of Tabitha’s Salon Takeover.
But Let the Great World Spin looks like a potential Tournament juggernaut to me, early ‘90s U.N.L.V., if you will. In fact, I’d take Let the Great World Spin versus the field straight up. Now, it wasn’t my personal favorite read of the Tournament (though I enjoyed it quite a bit), but it just has the feel of an award winner, maybe because it’s already won a big (National Book) award. As Baldwin notes, it’s a “monster,” the kind of book I think only a handful of writers can try to pull off and McCann did it successfully.
Kevin: I know the regard you have (as I do) for Jesus’ Son, so that’s high praise for Mun. I think I enjoyed Let the Great World Spin even more than you and Rosecrans did. Crans suggests that he liked it less at the end, but I actually thought the ending was moving without being sentimental. It’s a book that is broadly ambitious, but also extremely readable. It was very near the top of my personal list (among the nine entries I read) and I think it’s safe to say we have an early favorite. If I can switch to an Olympics metaphor, Let the Great World Spin has blistered its way onto the leader board after its first run.
John: The gravitas practically oozes off the pages and while I personally preferred the time I spent with Miles From Nowhere, if we’re looking at something suitable for an award, even one that comes in the form of live fowl, Let the Great World Spin just feels like that kind of book.
Kevin: Let the Great World Spin also has an Oscar-winning documentary companion, the terrific Man on Wire about Phillipe Petit’s high-wire crossing of the World Trade Center. Last year’s runner-up, City of Refuge, also had an Oscar-nominated film (Trouble the Water) that helped illustrate the central conceit. If anyone’s currently working on a novel about Daniel Ellsberg, we’ll save you a spot in next year’s competition.
As for our friendly wager, John, you and I both had Let the Great World Spin at the top of our confidence rankings, and so we head into the next contest tied with 16 points each.
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