Colum McCann's TransAtlantic kept me up until midnight the other night, delighting in his lyrical language and the sweeping scope, reading aloud particularly brilliant phrases, passages and insights. Wow, I had discovered an amazing writer. (Okay, so everybody else--millions apparently--read Let the Great World Spin. And McCann seems to have written many, many books while this rural honey bunny was out stacking wood.)

Last night I searched reviews of TransAtlantic because the opinions of more erudite readers help to define what I feel or think. Apparently, McCann as a writer has many flaws, including some of the stuff that made me swoon. Theo Tait in The Guardian (June 1, 2013), wrote: "Stylistically, McCann leans very heavily on one particular syntactical formation, the sentence capped by two or more lilting verbless fragments, which comes to seem like a mechanical affectation. ("He will pause a moment, watching. Her hair askew. Her body long and slim and quiet against the sheets. The baby against her.")"

I loved this sort of verbless, visual word artistry.

But soon the deconstructing was on, and I read reviews in the NY Times and the National Post and then the Goodreads reviews (some men were fairly ruthless and made good points). I began to take apart the whole and I thought, Yep, this "novel" started as a collection of short stories. His colleagues, agent and publisher reminded him that short stories are bad (except if you're Alice Munro), so he then began the fragmented threading of his Book One, Book Two, the three famous, important men, the four unimportant, un-famous women...creating brief interactions between these sets of people that don't come to anything, if you want to get into it. And why Hannah (only 72, dear reader, but driving fearfully and acting, in general, much older and, besides, isn't particularly interesting), is the only character in 1st person, the reader doesn't know. And the letter. Aw.


Reading the reviews, thinking like a writer, I was thrilled to unfold the layers, take a critical look, discover the holes in the weaving; I nodded in agreement, I inhaled in excitement over a flaw I hadn't thought of; oh, it was so much fun. I wish I had made so many mistakes on such a grand scale!

Overall, however, yes and yes, nevertheless, as a reader I let it spin and enthrall me. I can't wait to read McCann's other books, in publishing order, to see where this writer started and where his willingness to think big, be tender, throw gobs of controlled and beautiful language all over the page, will take him next.