‘Brooklyn’
by Colm Tóibín
262 pages, 2009 Scribner
 
and

‘Let the Great World Spin’
by Colum McCann
350 pages, 2009 Random House

The City that Never Sleeps. Gotham. The Big Apple. The Capital of the World. The Empire City. Whatever you call it, New York is one of the most historically and culturally important cities on the planet. Every year, dozens of movies and television shows and hundreds of books are based in NYC. And while it was beginning to seem like an old hat to use NYC as a setting, two Irish authors have recently written such remarkable novels about a particular time in the city’s history that it seems impossible to doubt that it will ever go out of fashion. Both bring NYC to life not only as a place but as a character itself.

“Brooklyn,” by Colm Tóibín, takes place in the 1950s. It’s the story of Eilis, a young Dubliner who is sent by her family to live in America. Brooklyn, specifically. Across the ocean is the promise of work, something scarce in Ireland at the time. Eilis is a no frills, modest young woman, with a head for numbers and a life devoid of the drama and romance seemingly experienced by other girls her age. She loves her simple life at home with her mother and sister and is (inwardly) outraged when it is arranged for her to travel to New York. But Eilis’s family members are proud, stoic people, and so off she silently goes on a harrowing journey across the sea.

At first, she is miserable, living in a boardinghouse with several louder, flashier young women and a bitter landlord, who latches on Eilis as an example of how a young woman should be, making relations harder for her with the other boarders. A priest from Ireland, who has set up a parish in Brooklyn, arranges work for Eilis at a department store on Fifth Avenue, and she loathes the job. She’d much rather work in accounting than sell nylons and undergarments. But it is work, and as Tóibín marvelously illustrates with his precise, quiet narrative, Eilis is a good girl and makes all attempts to put others’ needs before her own. She eventually warms up to the city, where she meets a nice young man and falls in love. Later, when tragedy strikes at home, the choices she makes even then are made with heartbreaking clarity and sensibleness. “Brooklyn” is a lovely book.

Phillipe Petit’s dazzling 1974 tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, beautifully recounted in the Academy Award-winning 2008 documentary “Man on Wire,” is at the heart of Colum McCann’s gorgeous new book “Let the Great World Spin.” Told in a series of intertwining stories, almost all of them have a foot grounded in that day. It is near impossible for mention of the towers not to bring up the horrific memories of them falling to the ground in 2001, and McCann’s novel itself is full of loss and testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

“Let the Great World Spin” is itself a precarious balancing act. McCann writes his stories carefully, never letting them slip into the maudlin or overly sentimental. A sensitive young Irish man travels to NYC to become a priest, where he cares for the downtrodden; a support group for mothers who lost sons in Vietnam convenes at the Park Avenue home of one of its members; a mother remembers her daughter as she stands beside the girl’s casket; two spoiled socialites try and deal with the aftermath of a day’s reckless actions. Like Petit himself, the characters are poised to possibly fall, and McCann humbly allows people from all walks of life their flaws and stumbles. “Let the Great World Spin” is jaw-dropping in its beauty.

So, can there be too many books about New York City? Not yet. Not if they continue to be as amazing as these.