McCann’s third book and second novel, This Side of Brightness has a number of things in common with McCann’s most recent novel, the prize winning Let the Great World Spin. Both novels are set in New York; both involve issues of race, class, and immigration; and both novels are testimonies to the fragility and resilience of the human condition. Some people get crushed by circumstance and choice in McCann’s novels and others endure, struggling on, reclaiming hope from ruin’s ashes. This Side of Brightness has two main narrative threads. One begins in the early 20th century with the digging of the tunnels that will be New York’s subway system and moves forward through the decades, describing the life of sandhogs, the men who dug the tunnels, focusing on one of a trio of survivors who were sucked up from their dig beneath the East River and shot through the muck, mud, and river water to the surface. The other occurs in contemporary New York (late 1990s) and involves a set of characters, mole people, who live in the tunnels. One of the tunnel people, Treefrog, as you suspect from the beginning, will unite the two threads, his backstory revealed over time until it intersects with that of the sandhog families. The primary sandhog is an African-American named Walker. He marries an Irish-American woman and continues to work with his brawn, though an intelligent man, until his body betrays him and he must then fight through a premature old age to help his troubled son and family. Treefrog was once married and a father, a capable provider, who retreated underground after he either imagined or actually molested his daughter. He has tremendous balance and no fear of heights and for a time worked building skyscrapers, including working on the construction of the World Trade Center. His home underground is high up in the cavernous tunnel near Riverside Park and can only be accessed by climbing and walking along narrow I-beams scores of feet above the tracks. That image of danger, balance, darkness and light, of being at home in a lost place, pervades the novel. McCann is a canny writer. He gets character and dialogue right and builds a solid narrative that reveals and deepens as the reader advances. His talent is evident on every page and This Side of Brightness is a very good book.
If I come to an author late, I like to go visit the earlier works, to see the progression. That, and I’m a completist. Having loved Let the Great World Spin and liked Zoli and Transatlantic, I wanted to see where Colum McCann came from. Other than, you know, Ireland.In This Side of Brightness, we see an already competent writer not yet in full confident stride. And there is already a formula, a template: take a relatively obscure historical event or two, connect them with plot lines which take about 300 pages to connect, and sprinkle in some vignettes to lift a social issue, usually racism. That can get tiresome, even when reading an author’s works in reverse order.Here, McCann uses a device of alternating chapters: one telling the story of a sandhog, an under-river tunnel worker named Nathan Walker, and then a chapter following the exploits of a homeless man nicknamed Treefrog. Back and forth. Early 20th Century and late 20th Century, with the early plot creeping slowly towards the later one. Think the stories might be connected? So, it felt contrived to me. This worked in Let the Great World Spin because the writing was just so damn good. In This Side of Brightness, the writing was not just so damn good. At times it was wince-able. Even the imagery seemed contrived, bold-faced: a man seeking balance by doing things with each hand or stabbing himself after stabbing another man. Kind of matches the alternating chapters, doesn’t it? It was so much more subtly done in LTGWS.There’s promise here, like this sentence: There is one Englishman, Cricket, who serves his vowels as if holding them out on a tong. But precious little of that.In any event, that was then and this is now. McCann is a go-to guy now, an author to be read upon publication and not a year later at a used book store. _____ _____ _____ _____One eerie thing: the front cover of my edition of this 1998 book shows the World Trade Center silhouetted in the distance. McCann takes us there again, of course, in Let the Great World Spin. But now the balance is told in shuffled vignettes of impressionistic tones. Which I still remember, not having been sledgehammered over the head with them. A good lesson.
What do You think about This Side Of Brightness (2003)?
I was absolutely head over heels in love with this book.......until the last chapter. (view spoiler)[Why, why, why did Colum McCann have to put a "happy/hopeful" ending on it? Is it that he thinks this is what the public wants? Well, not me. (hide spoiler)]
—Chrissie
Start with something positive; I loved the prose of this book. The writing was so smooth and really quite beautiful. That I enjoyed. The actual story...not so much. I was very disappointed after the hype about this book ~ I thought that this would be about the Irish experience in New York and for about a paragraph and a half it was. Much has been said about a white Irishman writing about the black experience, and that I don't have a problem with ~ what I don't like is that the African-American struggle had been told before, many times before and to greater success. The overall experience of the men who dug the tunnels in New York has not been told before and *that* is what I wanted to read. To take a somewhat obscure event and use that as the central theme, but then not really use it as much more than a footnote is so disappointing. It was a beautifully written poem, but a very disappointing story.
—David
This was an interesting story of the transportation tunnel under the East River connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan. McCann tells the story of the tunnel through juxtaposing chapters, first the building of the tunnel and the tragic lives of the immigrant workers through the eyes of Nathan Walker and the later live of the tunnel through the eyes of Treefrog, a homeless man living in/near the tunnel. Its not as well done as Rutherfurd or Steinbeck in terms of writing about the American peril or documenting a place/object through the eyes of several generations of characters, but still McCann is a talented writer and there are some lovely gems in this book.
—Debra Lowman
