The Great World’s New York

Colum McCann has talked in a recent interview about his interest in “the blurred spaces between fiction and nonfiction, the ‘real that’s imagined and the imagined that’s real.’” In his view, the “best writers attempt to become alternative historians,” noting that his understanding of early twentieth- century Dublin has been “almost entirely guided by my reading of Ulysses.”1 It is not surprising, then, that despite all the believable details of the New York setting described in Chapter 3, the New York of The Great World, in which so many plot events take place, is clearly not a direct representation of any “real,” physically accessible New York. Apart from anything else, the New York of Books One, Two, and Three is a 1970s New York, and the New York of Book Four, which is set in 2006, is a very different place; so there are at least two versions of New York in the novel. In addition, as each chapter except the first is focalized through a different character, the 1970s chapters present ten different versions of New York. And finally, today’s New York—the New York that might be known to or visited by contemporary readers—is different again, as are the many historical New Yorks that will exist in the memories and imaginations of the novel’s many readers. Taking these various historical, known, and imagined New Yorks into account, and adding them to the New York that emerges from the narrative, it becomes clear that the cumulative New York of the event of The Great World will always be a blend of fact and fiction, memory and projection, the verifiable and the imagined.