This Side of Brightness: A Novel
by Colum McCann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Colum McCannEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-01
ISBN: 0312421974
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of This Side of Brightness: A Novel
Book Review: Watching The River Flow
Summary: 5 Stars
'This Side of Brightness' is a throbbingly good read which trawls the making of the underclass in trenchant prose. The voice is unmistakably McCanns', though the subject matter recalls the marvellous McCarthy's,'Suttree' and my favourit Ondatjee,'Skin of the Lion'. The fact of 'blackness' cuts through this tale. Using time shifts in alternating chapters, we reach the intersection between 1916 and 1991 as the third generation descendant of an Afro American tunnel builder, Clarence'Treefrog' Walker, copes with his family's checquered past. His grandmother was mowed down by car, his father murders the driver and is in turn done in by the cops. His mum turns to drink and then smack which kills her. He's raised by grandfather, Nathan. Some years after he marries and has a child. The rock in his life, the old man dies.He spins out and the wife, unable to tolerate his disintegration, abandons him taking the child. The gradual recognition of these connexions unfolds against the nefarious netherworld of New York's subterranean culture. Once an acrobatic genius on sky-scraper scaffolding, with his world imploding,Treefrog enters tunnel life, a descent with a radically different drive from the heroic grandfather. Treefrog rescues an attractive, drug-addicted whore from the violent clutches of a fellow denizen. Making love, a seeming reconciliation of emotions for his mother and wife, he is determined to, once again, scale the brighter world. The seemingly futile gesture which introduces him on the first page: freeing a heron from the frozen Hudson River, is given fresh resonance.
Summary of This Side of Brightness: A Novel
At the turn of the century, Nathan Walker comes to New York City to take the most dangerous job in the country. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed, the sandhogs?black, white, Irish, Italian?dig together, the darkness erasing all differences. Above ground, though, the men keep their distance until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow sandhogs that will both bless and curse three generations.
This Side of Brightness weaves historical fact with fictional truth, creating a remarkable tale of death, racism, homelessness--and yes, love--spanning four generations. Two characters dominate Colum McCann's narrative: Treefrog, a homeless man with a dark and shameful secret, and Nathan Walker, a black man who came north in the early years of the century to work as a "sandhog," digging the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. Tunneling is perhaps the most dangerous occupation a man could have; in the close, dark, and dangerous pits far beneath the city streets, differences such as color or ethnic background cease to matter, and Walker soon becomes friends with his crewmates: two Irishmen and an Italian. Then an explosion in one of the tunnels literally blows Walker and three other men up through the earth and into the East River. Walker survives, but his best friend Con O'Leary is never found. Leary leaves behind a wife and young daughter whom Walker marries many years later.
Walker's tale is told in alternating chapters with Treefrog's, who, before his slide into homelessness, chose a hazardous profession--this one high up in the bright sunlight--as a construction worker building skyscrapers. But madness has brought Treefrog out of the light and back to the tunnels that Walker helped dig as he scrapes out a meager existence among the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and petty criminals that make up the homeless community. But the grimness of McCann's tale is leavened by the beauty of his prose and the intimations all through the book that, even on this side of darkness, redemption is possible.
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