Twin Towers shimmer throughout New York novels

Three foreign born writers take on the challenge of New York City, its intoxicating promise as well as the punches it doles out to the novice and the native alike.

Each novel explores a different decade: the stiff conventions of 1950s Brooklyn, the wild west atmosphere of the 1970s, and and the bankrupt present decade. Two Irish and a Russian have recently penned novels about the big kahuna that will travel well this fall, as you make your way to less familiar destinations.

Let The Great World Spin (2009)
Colum McCann

On August 7, 1974, French street performer Philippe Petit, with the help of friends, strings a cable between the Twin Towers and walks across, startling crowds and mortifying the police with his feats of daring. This novel only loosely slips this real person in, more as a metaphor. McCann, a native of Ireland, dwells on the characters a quarter of a mile below and how they meet the summer of his walk. We are taken way up to the Bronx where a radical Irish monk tries to make life easier for a group of black prostitutes selling themselves underneath the Deegan Expressway. In an uptown Park Avenue penthouse another group of women, mothers of soldiers lost to the war, console one another. Class differences divide the group, but sometimes a human connection defies economic and racial differences. Hippies . . . the working class . . . a photographer who walks off the subway . . . a son of immigrants . . . loosely woven lives turn you up streets that give you the sense of the mid 1970s. McCann cleverly uses the Twin Towers and a photo that foreshadows tragedy, calling to an empty spot in the sky where one man was able to make the crossing.

Brooklyn: A Novel (2009)
Colm Toibin

Ellis Lacey, a young woman from Enniscorthy, Ireland, seems to be in the shadow of her beautiful and brilliant sister Rose, when their parish priest makes her an offer that seems unbelievable. He wants her to travel to the Uunited States, to a place called Brooklyn. Young girls are needed to work in downtown Brooklyn shops and her part time job in a small hometown is not enough to hold her back. Toibin does a good job of geting inside the head of Ellis, who must give up everything she knows to make her Atlantic crossing. We see on her first ship crossing that she is very capable and learns quickly. Brooklyn in the 1950s is filled with boarding houses of young people from many different European countries, a kaleidoscope for Ellis who never before has left Enniscorthy. This is a serious novel, which has an old fashioned feel. Less complicated than McCann's spinning world, nevertheless it has its strange twists and we feel the immigrant's dilemma, not fitting into the new world and equally unable to reach back to the old. Her young Italian boyfriend tries to guide her through, but Ellis would love to retreat into her more familiar Irish world. If you yearn for the old Brooklyn neighborhoods, with women who never went on the subway without their best dress and little white gloves, this might be the novel for you.

Absurdistan: A Novel (2006)
Gary Shteyngart

It's only fitting that Gary Shteyngart should take on our present era of stock market crashes and evaporating jobs. It's fitting because Shteyngart is funny, having immigrated here from Leningrad at the close of the Soviet era. Misha Borisovich Vainbeg is a very fat and innocent 18 year old who comes to America for college. His father, a Russian gangster, becomes very successful as the Soviet Union crumbles at the end of the Cold War.

"When I graduated from Accidental College with all the honors they could bestow on a fat Russian Jew, I decided that, like many young people, I should move to Manhattan," Misha tells us; "American education aside, I was still a Soviet citizen at heart, afflicted with a kind of Stalinist gigantamania, so that when I looked at the topography of Manhattan, I natually settled my gaze on the Twin Towers of the Wold Trade Center, those emblematic honeycombed 110 story giants that glowed white gold in the afternoon sun...You could say I was in love with them."

Misha also has a girlfriend from Harlem when his family calls him back to Russia in 1999, and he is foced to stay there when his father kills an Oklahoma businessman. Misha is now caught between his love/hate for St. Petersburg and his own people, and his father's new-found wealth. Similar to Ellis in Booklyn, he is at once caught between multiple wrolds, his two are just much funnier. His path becomes more convuluted as does his state of mind.

Shteyngart sets his novel in the summer and fall of 2001, giving this mostly satirical novel a heft that resonates as we anticipate what is about to befall New York and the rest of the world. He also includes a now-clairvoyant cameo by BP executives, doing what they know best to the world in general in a little kingdom called Absurdistan.