Franzen and McCann: What we really look for in fiction

Whether or not the final section (Book 4) of Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin" really works is almost beside the point. In final section he takes one of the characters, whom we'd seen only as an orphaned child in the Bronx adopted by a caring mother, who is now a young, independent woman - it's 26 years later - struggling with the burden of her origin: mother and grandmother were Bronx prostitutes. Well raised by a caring mother, she's independent but lonesome, unable to make connections. We see her heading back to nyc for a deathbed meeting with her "aunt," who was the wealthy East Side mother who'd lost a son in Vietnam. Well, the connections do feel a little forced, a little too much of an authorial trick, and the plotting of this last section is sketchier than some of the earlier sections - I'm not sure, for example, that this section could stand alone, whereas some of the others are like novellas. That said, I think it's very beautiful how McCann can present the lineaments of a life story and link it by threads - much like the tightrope stretched across the sky - to the other elements in his capacious novel. Generally, I don't like long books brimming with plot, but I've found myself quite captivated by two recent long novels, this one and Freedom, so maybe I've been undernourished lately by a diet of minimalism. Readers or pseudo readers often complain that novelists today aren't writing fiction the way the used to; maybe Franzen and McCann are just two throwbacks, and you can't exactly call their novels conventional - McCann's in particular uses many devices of high Modernism - but there's a retro feel to both these books, and it's good to see that both have been quite successful with readers and with critics. They provide what we really do look for in fiction: a world, a set of characters, believable, likable even in their failings, a clear and distinct authorial style that is suitable to the material and not full of itself.