This Side of Brightness: A Novel - Hardcover

McCann, Colum

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805054529 ISBN 13: 9780805054521

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 1998

Synopsis

From the author of Songdogs, a magnificent work of imagination and history set in the tunnels of New York City.

In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs--black, white, Irish, Italian--keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers--a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations. Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, ures a punishing winter in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival--killing rats, scavenging for discarded soda cans, washing in the snow. Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill-fated loves and uninted crimes. In a triumph of plotting, the two stories fuse to form a tale of family, race, and redemption that is as bold and fabulous as New York City itself. In This Side of Brightness, Colum McCann confirms his place in the front ranks of modern writers.

About this title

About the Author

Colum McCann is the author of  books including This Side of Brightness, Zoli, Songdogs and Let the Great World Spin. He has received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and was named the first winner of the Grace Kelly Memorial Foundation Award and the Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

An ambitious, idiosyncratic, moving saga of immigrant life by Irish expatriate McCann (stories: Fishing the Sloe-black River, 1996; Songdogs, 1994, etc.). Writing in a prose of considerable allusive power, McCann ingeniously uses the NYC subway as a central symbol. In 1916, the excavation of subway tunnels gives immigrant Con O'Leary a chance at a decent job, otherwise denied to recent Irish arrivals. Among his fellow ``sandhogs'' is Nathan Walker, a young black man also determined to secure some part of the alluring American Dream. When O'Leary dies in one of the frequent cave-ins afflicting the massive project, Walker elects to help his devastated widow and young daughter. Over the succeeding years, a complex affection draws Nathan and Con's daughter Eleanor together, and eventually, despite the considerable risks involved, they marry. In a brisk narrative spanning eight decades, McCann finds in the struggles and fates of Eleanor and Nathan's descendants a vivid outline of the experiences of outcasts and immigrants in American society. In a sharply ironic touch the subway tunnels that had been, for Con and Nathan, a way into the mainstream have become, by the 1980's, a home for those on society's far fringes. Treefrog, a homeless man who's taken shelter beneath Riverside Park, has been so worn down by his social exile that he's uncertain of his past and his own name. McCann further stresses the increasing harshness of modern life by juxtaposing his depiction of Treefrog's impoverished, hallucinatory existence against some transcendent images of the natural world, including, most memorably, a recurrent image of a flock of cranes. A poet's version of a family saga, mingling original and persuasive imagery with a story of great dramatic impactand an angry, convincing criticism of the manner in which American society has repeatedly frustrated the attempts of outsiders to make a home. A haunting novel, by a writer emerging as a major talent (First printing of 35,000; Book-of-the-Month alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It is 1916, and somewhere under the East River in New York, the sandhogs and other workers labor through mud and muck and darkness to build a transit system for a fledgling metropolis. The sandhogs, the men out front who burrow through the earth, are the physically strong and mentally tenacious among the working poor; many of them once labored in mines. The earth is close in life and death; but they take pride in their work, which allows them a livable wage at the cost of their health. On this side of brightness, it is anathema to play the petty game of race that sports itself on earth's surface. Nathan Walker, a young black from Georgia, handsome, well formed, and generous, who reminds one of Melville's lovely Billy Budd, comes to New York with love in his heart for his home near the Okefenokee swamp and will build a bond with his fellow sandhogs--two Irishmen, Conn O'Leary and Sean Power, and an Italian, Rudy "Rhubard" Vanucci. Their bond is cemented in a way they could not have dreamed of when a small hole in the tunnel wall results in a spectacular river blowout. The tragedy shapes Walker's life in a story that spans generations. McCann is a fine and bold writer, as his previous books prove (Songdogs, 1995, and Fishing the Sloe-Black River, 1996). So it's not surprising to find him tackling the peculiar, unexplored, and violent nexus between the downtrodden and persecuted Irish and African American in a flawed promise land; but one is jolted by the level of understanding he conveys about the needs and compunctions of human existence. Bonnie Smothers

Called "New York's most visible up-and-coming Irish writer" by the New York Times, McCann skillfully evokes early 20th-century New York, where Irish mixed with African Americans and Italians to dig the tunnel under the East River.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805054529
• ISBN 13: 9780805054521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304