33 pages • 1 hour read
Colum McCannLet the Great World Spin
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book Three
Chapter 7 Summary: Part of the Parts
This chapter chronicles the day of the tightrope walker’s performance from the point of view of the judge before whom he appeared after being arrested. The judge is Solomon Soderberg, the rich husband of Claire from Chapter 2. Judge Soderberg has a very jaundiced view of life in New York. “There wasn’t a bad thing in the city that didn’t pass through Soderberg’s gutter watch. It was like studying the evolution of slime. You stand there long enough and the gutter gets slick, no matter how hard you battle against it” (257).
His principles of justice yield very different results on this day. The tightrope walker gets a clever token fine of $1.10, a penny for each floor of the World Trade Center. Tillie receives a long prison sentence for robbing a john who was sexually assaulting a prostitute.
Chapter 8 Summary: Centavos
In this chapter, the author presents Adelita’s version of her relationship with Corrigan. How she met him, how they fell in love, how they finally slept together, and how he still struggled with breaking his vows. After a night of lovemaking, Adelita and Corrigan have this exchange:
“Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness.”
Never heard of it,” he says.
“It’s a rare disease. I caught it just before the neighbors woke.”
“Is it contagious?”
“Don’t you have it yet?”
He kisses my lips, but then turns away from me. The unbearable weight of the complications he carries, his guilt, his joy” (276-77).
Adelita has no doubts. She is completely happy: she has found true love and wants it to last. “I told him that I loved and that I’d always love him” (277).
Chapter 9 Summary: All Hail and Hallelujah
The narrator of this chapter is Gloria, the black woman introduced in Chapter 2who lost three sons in Vietnam. She lives in the same housing project where Corrigan and the prostitutes lived. However, she lives the lifestyle “that people think is church going” (289).
She is the one who takes in Jazzlyn’s orphan girls and raises them as her own. “I knew almost right off. Them two babies needed looking after. It was a deep-down feeling that must’ve come from long ago” (285).
Gloria’s normal life stands in sharp contrast to the chaos around her. For one thing, she has a college education. “Still, I graduated with honors. I was one of the first colored women at Syracuse to do so” (303).
After Gloria’s visit to Claire’s fancy apartment on Park Avenue, she gets mugged on her way home. She takes a taxi back to Claire’s, and Claire takes care of her. It is a bonding experience for the two of them, and they become lifelong friends.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In Chapter 7, the author shows an entirely different point of view on life in New York in the late twentieth century. Judge Soderberg has little or no tolerance for the Tillies and Jazzlyns of the world. To him, crime, drugs and messy lives are unacceptable symptoms of a society in decline. He is the rich man who cannot empathize with the poor and oppressed. In particular, since he is a judge, it distorts his ideas about justice.
The reader observes him making two judicial decisions: to go easy on the tightrope walker and to punish Tillie and Jazzlyn. These decisions are based on prejudice rather than justice. They also have dire consequences, since Tillie’s sentence leads to her suicide in jail.
Chapter 8 describes true love in its most tragic version. Adelita and Corrigan love each other deeply, yet they are divided, primarily by Corrigan’s religious beliefs and vows.
The author suggests that happiness is elusive in the real world. Lovers come together at the wrong time or in the wrong circumstances. Yet, Adelita has the precious memories of her time with Corrigan before his death. Is that enough? Perhaps for her, it is. She experienced true love completely with Corrigan, something she never had with her soldier husband in Guatemala.
Chapter 9 creates a strong contrast. Gloria is a black woman living in a dangerous, poverty-stricken neighborhood. However, she is an educated woman with a strong sense of identity and purpose in her life. She does not succumb to the readily available distractions of drugs and sex.
Gloria is very successful in her friendship with Claire and in her relationship with her adopted daughters. McCann shows the reader that being black and poor does not inevitably lead to tragedy. This is McCann’s most optimistic chapter.
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