Spinning Consolation

ABOVE: Frenchman Philippe Petit, seen from 1,350 feet below, walking a tightrope stretched between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in NYC. 
––"Philippe Petit's real-life walk between the twin towers – in pictures"

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann is a novel about lives that intersect on or around August 7, 1974, the day Petit walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers.
Published in 2009, Great World is a reflection of 9/11. You could figure that, and the author confirms it:
"Intentionally so, yes, . . . but not only". [interview with McCann]

It's a book of consolation, a message book.
In the author's note at the end of the novel, McCann quotes the Arabic "Suspended Poems" of the sixth century:
"Is there any hope this desolation can bring me solace?"

The book constructs and delivers an answer:

Yes.

___________________

The character central to the book's first part, Corrigan, is appealing. He is an Irish monk who chooses to live in poverty in the devastated Bronx.

"What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth––the filth, the war, the poverty––was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell.

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence."
_______________

That's wordy. (The book is wordy.) But I like that passage--it reminds me of what I see at the thrift store.
So I trimmed and rearranged it, here:

"What Corrigan wanted was a believable God, one you could find in everyday grime. He wasn't interested in heaven.  Rather he consoled himself that when he looked into the darkness of the real world, he might find a little light shining on small beauties, damaged and bruised.
He wanted the world to be a better place. He was in the habit of hoping for it."

Corrigan was interesting, I liked him, but once he sets the other characters in motion, the author removes him, and I lost interest.
The book does not feel bare and believable but like the author's construction, built to deliver comfort.

I've been fretting about why I didn't like this book. Writing this out, it's this:
I like when people tell me THEIR hope, their consolation.
I don't like it when they preach it as a recipe for MY (your) consolation.
Secondhand consolation.

Work out your own consolation.