33 pages • 1 hour read
Colum McCannA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Corrigan rebels against convention by smoking and drinking and spending his time with alcoholics on the street. He seems to find both excitement and meaning in relating to the down-and-outs of Dublin.
Corrigan is an Irish Catholic whose religious beliefs influence and control his life and actions. He is a Christian in the most direct way, as a follower and imitator of Jesus Christ. One way this manifests is his service to the poor both in Ireland and in New York.
When Corrigan joins the order of monks in Belgium, he takes the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The poverty is something he accepts naturally. The obedience is only a little challenging: he does not want to go to New York, but he does go. The chastity he sees as part of his commitment to loving God and his neighbor. When he fully gives himself to God and neighbor, there is no room for romantic love in his life.
He considers his attraction to Adelita to be a test and struggles with his decision to fall in love or reject her. Eventually, he does express his love and sleeps with his beloved.
Shortly thereafter, he dies, and Adelita is never sure if he would have continued their relationship.
Corrigan is the most fully developed character in the novel. The author uses him as a tragic figure to focus on the struggle between love of God and love of others and God’s will vs. human needs and desires. It is a testament to McCann’s great talent and skill that the reader never sees Corrigan as a hollow symbol. He is a complex and completely believable human being.
Ciaran is Corrigan’s older brother by two years. He is much less adventurous than Corrigan as they are growing up in Ireland. He does not smoke or drink as an adolescent. When he comes to stay with his brother in New York, he is shocked by Corrigan’s close friendships with the local prostitutes. He is also appalled by the dirt and danger in Corrigan’s building and lifestyle.
Ciaran does not understand what he sees as Corrigan’s fanatical dedication to religion and God. Ciaran wants what most ordinary people want out of life: some safety, security, love and affection. Eventually, he finds a lasting relationship with Lara.
Ciaran functions as a contrasting character to Corrigan. He is the responsible older brother with a “realistic” view of life. He does not take the risks Corrigan does, nor does he have endure the same existential struggles. Ciaran is a normative character, an average Joe against whom the reader can see the extremes of other characters’ behaviors.
Like the brothers from Ireland, Adelita is an immigrant. She comes to the U.S. from Central America where she has endured violence close to home, including the death of her husband. Adelita is somewhat thwarted by her immigrant status. She is wishes to be a doctor, but in the U.S. she cannot afford medical school and must work as a nurse.
She is very family-oriented, in some ways following the stereotype of Hispanics. She loves her children and dreams of Corrigan becoming her husband and a father to her children. Being with Corrigan would complete her broken family.
As a character, Tillie is a variation on the type of the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold. Tillie has admirable qualities that she cannot see herself but which are evident to the reader. She truly loves her daughter and granddaughters, and she loves Corrigan. She sacrifices her freedom and, ultimately, her life to protect her only child.
Tillie is also an important symbolic character in McCann’s development of the themes of racism and sexism in American culture. She is a black woman in New York City. Her poverty and her profession are no surprise.
Jazzlyn, Tillie’s daughter, is a black woman who works as a prostitute like her mother. She is differentiated from Tillie by being very young and the mother of two girls. She is also a victim of socio-economic forces. She is poor and black, she is surrounded by drugs, and she is discriminated against in the criminal justice system. She dies early and tragically.
Jazzlyn’s life brings up an obvious question. Given the oppressive forces that doom Jazzlyn, will her daughters inevitably become drug-addicted sex workers too? The novel says, “No.” Jazzlyn’s daughters are “rescued” by Gloria, a different kind of black woman. For one thing, the girls get the education their mother and grandmother never received. American society also changes around them from the 1970s onward, especially regarding civil rights and women’s rights. Jaslyn and her sister Janice have opportunities for a normal life that were not available to their mother and grandmother.
In the second chapter, the author introduces Claire, a fifty-two-year old white woman who lives on the Upper East Side, the most luxurious and expensive neighborhood in New York. The contrast between Claire’s life and circumstances and that of Corrigan, Tillie, and Jazzlyn in the South Bronx is dizzying. Claire has a doorman to keep undesirables like these characters far away from her and her apartment. She worries about how neat and clean her space is and whether the doorman might be rude to her guests who are clearly of a lower class and, in the case of Gloria, a different race.
At first appearance, she seems to be a rich, neurotic woman, disconnected from the difficulties that other humans experience every day. She is even annoyed that one of her guests is determined to tell the story of the tightrope walker rather than listen to Claire’s sad tales of losing her son Joshua.
McCann then gives her more depth and complexity. She is a loving mother and a good and caring friend. She suffers grief the way every mother, every parent of Vietnam War casualties, did. She is much more like ordinary people than what one might expect from her wealth and status. It is important to note that the book ends with Claire near death. It is her passing that marks the end of the story and the end of an era.
Claire’s husband Solomon is much more of a stereotype than she is. He is rich, white, Jewish, privileged, and powerful. In his role as a judge, he decides people’s fates. His central choices in the novel are to free the tightrope walker and to put the streetwalker Tillie in jail. He believes that he has done a good day’s work. He has saved the city from embarrassment in the case of the tightrope walker’s performance. He has saved the city from further crime by locking up a lawbreaker.
Neither the author nor the reader would agree with Judge Soderberg. Tillie should have been free to go home and be with her granddaughters after the death of Jazzlyn.
It is therefore ironic that McCann has given this character the name of the wise king Solomon. Solomon’s most famous case involved deciding who the rightful mother of an infant child was. King Solomon offered to cut the baby in half and give a piece to each of the women petitioning him. He rightly judges that the woman who cried out immediately to give up the child and save its life was the true mother. This modern Solomon showed much less wisdom and compassion.
Gloria is very brave. Gloria lives in poverty in a terribly dangerous neighborhood and reports that she has already been mugged seven times. Despite this, she still has the strength to go to Park Avenue and befriend Claire, a wealthy woman of another race. After losing three sons in the war, Gloria starts over to build a new family with Jazzlyn’s orphaned daughters. She is the novel’s heroine.
Lara is an artist who, with her husband Blaine, lives simply in the woods creating art in the style of the 1920s. They live a wild, Bohemian lifestyle and use drugs.
Lara is a passenger in the car that causes the doubly fatal crash. Lara reacts with normal fear and horror at what has happened, “She was in a pool of blood, Blaine.” Her partner seems cruelly indifferent to the deaths. “Not my fault.” She replies with intensity, “She was all smashed up. And that guy. He was just lying there against the steering wheel” (121)
Lara has enough feelings of guilt to retrieve Corrigan’s effects from the hospital and take them to his brother. McCann foreshadows later events by having Lara feel attracted to Ciaran on the day of Jazzlyn’s funeral. Her chapter ends with her freezing and turning away when she feels drawn to Ciaran; her last thought in Chapter 3 is “There is a fear of love” (156).
Lara is, however, referred to towards the end of the book when the reader discovers that she has married Ciaran. This suggests that she has changed her point of view dramatically.
In the final chapter, Jazzlyn’s daughter Jaslyn is a mature, professional woman with a good job at a nonprofit in Little Rock, Arkansas, far, far away from the streets of New York. Her story demonstrates that the cycle of poverty can be broken.
Jaslyn also illustrates the difference between growing up in New York before the civil rights and women’s movements, as Tillie did and after these changes, as Jaslyn did. The shifts in America’s values in her lifetime has been monumental.
Jaslyn is an admirable character. She has come to New York to say good-bye to her mother’s friend. Jaslyn is kind and generous and caring. The reader does not see her growing up with Gloria as a mother and role model, but it is clear that at least some of Jaslyn’s virtues have been passed down from Gloria.
By Colum McCann