Let the Great World Spin: Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Ciaran provides a detailed account of his brother Corrigan’s life, beginning with their shared childhood in Dublin, Ireland, where they are raised on the edge of Dublin Bay by their single mother. Their father abandons the family when the boys are very young, his only presence reduced to a weekly check addressed to their mother and a wardrobe full of his old suits.

At night Corrigan recites his prayers on the top bunk in the boys’ shared room. These prayers are unlike anything Ciaran has ever heard: they are punctuated by laughter and sighs and are frantically rhythmic, like incantations. They are entirely unique. Ciaran, on the other hand, knows only the standard Catholic prayers and doesn’t care much for religion; much to his chagrin, Corrigan often prays like this throughout the night, stopping only momentarily when Ciaran kicks the bed or tells him to shut up. Sometimes Ciaran wakes in the morning to find his brother in bed beside him, still reciting his prayers.

Corrigan is a charismatic, charming boy. People are naturally drawn to him. One night when Ciaran is eleven and Corrigan is nine, Ciaran wakes up to a cold rush of air. He moves to shut the window, but it is closed. In the middle of the room Corrigan is bent over, the smell of cold air and cigarette smoke rolling off his body. He tells Ciaran to go back to sleep and returns to his bed. In the morning, when Ciaran asks where he went, Corrigan tells him that he was “just along by the water.” Despite Ciaran’s insistence, he claims that he did not smoke.

Later that morning, when their mother walks them to school, Ciaran notices his mother’s eye catch something on the other side of the road. It is a man wrapped in a large red blanket. An obvious drunk or vagrant, the man raises his hand, and Corrigan waves back. Ciaran asks who it is, but his mother doesn’t answer, saying that they’ll sort it out after school. Ciaran doesn’t receive an answer from Corrigan, either, who disappears into his classroom.

When the boys return home from school that day, there is a brown paper package waiting for Corrigan on his bed. Inside it is another blanket. Corrigan unfolds it, looks up at his mother, and nods. She touches his face and says, “Never again, understand?” This is the last that is said about the event until two years later, when Corrigan gives the new blanket away to another homeless man on a frigid Dublin night. This, Ciaran says in retrospect, is the first inclination of what his brother will become when he’s an adult helping “the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless” in New York.

At around the age of twelve or thirteen Corrigan starts getting drunk after school on Fridays. He goes to the seedy parts of town with a bottle of wine and hands it around to the hardened drunks of Dublin. They laugh at him and use him for his money, sending him out for more alcohol or cigarettes. Sometimes he comes home sockless or shirtless, runs up the stairs, brushes his teeth, and comes back downstairs just sober enough to evade his mother’s full suspicion. When asked where he was, he answers, “God’s work.”

Soon enough Corrigan becomes a regular in the flophouses with the seasoned drunks. He listens to their long stories of hardship as if he is an apprentice trying to learn the ways of poverty, trying to take on some of the burden. And although Corrigan never mentions it, Ciaran can tell that some of this behavior also has to do with the absence of their father.

On his fourteenth birthday Corrigan gets too drunk to hide it. His mother catches him and makes him promise not to drink again, imposing a new curfew on Fridays. But two weeks later he returns to his regular routine, though now he doesn’t drink as much. Instead, he just spends time with the drunks, thinking that they need him there, as if he is “a mad, impossible angel.”

The boys’ mother dies of cancer when Ciaran is nineteen and Corrigan is seventeen. As they stand over her dead body at the hospital, their father appears in the doorway. Corrigan refuses to embrace him, rushing by him out of the room. That night, Corrigan doesn’t allow their father to sleep in the master bedroom, instead forcing him to spend the night on the couch. The night before their mother’s funeral, Corrigan gives away all of their father’s old suits to the city’s homeless drunks, who appear on the front lawn the next morning.

As the boys grow older, Corrigan becomes more devoutly religious. When they sell the house, he gives away his share of the money and lives off of charity, all the while studying the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi. Not long afterward, he goes to Emo College in County Laois to study with the Jesuits. Here he becomes even more ascetic and serious, attending early morning Mass and engaging in long hours of theological study.

The religious institution at Emo College is not a good fit for Corrigan’s unique faith, which requires room for doubt. As such, he leaves the school and moves to Brussels to join an Order of young Catholic monks. He takes vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience and continues studying religious poetry and liberation theology (a doctrine that emphasizes helping the poor and marginalized). He drives a fruit truck for a co-op and lives a simple life with minimal furniture. When the Order assigns him a posting in New York City in the early seventies, Corrigan begrudgingly packs his bags, for he thinks his time would be better spent somewhere in “the Third World.” Nonetheless, he boards a plane headed for America.

By this time Ciaran has dropped out of university, lived for a short time as a late-blooming hippie, and has taken an office job despite his desire for a wilder lifestyle. One day he goes to an outdoor market to buy a bag of marijuana and is caught in a bomb explosion. He loses the tip of his ear but is otherwise unharmed. Seeing that the violence of the Northern Ireland Conflict has finally made its way south to Dublin, he decides to join his brother in America.

Ciaran arrives at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City. Corrigan, who said he would meet him, is nowhere to be seen. Overwhelmed by the city, Ciaran makes his own way to his brother’s address in the Bronx. On the subway he stares at a black woman, realizing that he has never seen a black person so close before. When Ciaran finally reaches the Bronx, he gets in a cab that is reluctant to drop him off at his brother’s address in the government housing projects. The cab drives in circles and finally lets him off at a curb near Corrigan’s building, speeding off immediately after Ciaran gets out.

Prostitutes line the streets. One in particular holds a parasol and calls out to Ciaran, who immediately says, “I’m broke.” She calls him an asshole and keeps moving. Perplexed, he watches her before moving toward the projects, stepping over heroin needles as he goes.

Corrigan’s apartment is on the fifth floor of a twenty-story building. Ciaran opens the door—which is unlocked—to find a room empty except for a ripped sofa, a table, and a wooden crucifix above a single bed. He collapses on the couch and sleeps until he is suddenly awoken by the prostitute who had been carrying the parasol on the street. She comes through the door and slinks out of her coat, suddenly naked except for her boots. She looks at herself in the mirror, goes to the bathroom, and comes out with freshly applied lipstick and perfume. She leaves, but over the course of the afternoon five or six other prostitutes come in and do similar things.

Later that night Corrigan finally comes home. He wakes up Ciaran to say hello. Corrigan is even thinner than he always has been and his hair is long. His face is cut and bruised and he looks older than he should. The two brothers reacquaint themselves, and Ciaran discovers that Corrigan leaves his door unlocked so that the prostitutes, whom he has befriended, can use his bathroom between clients. Ciaran asks about his brother’s bruised face, and Corrigan tells him that the pimps sometimes beat him up as a way of showing him their power—they don’t trust the way he helps the prostitutes and are suspicious of his intentions. Corrigan shrugs this off, insisting that it isn’t a big deal to let them use his bathroom from time to time. He makes his brother tea and prays.

Three prostitutes enter the room while Corrigan is praying. One of them is the woman with the parasol, whose name is Tillie. Another clearly younger woman is named Jazzlyn. The third is named Angie. They flirt and joke with Corrigan, clearly displaying their affection for him. When Jazzlyn starts preparing to shoot up heroin, Corrigan reaches across and puts his hand on her, saying, “Not here, you know you can’t do that in here.” When the women leave, Ciaran is astonished that his brother shows them such lenience and kindness, saying that they’re all a “mess,” a statement Corrigan refutes by arguing that they’re good people simply racked by fear.

Finally, when the conversation dies down, Ciaran brings up the fact that Corrigan didn’t come to the funeral when their father died several months before. Corrigan asks what scriptures were read, and Ciaran can’t remember. He asks Corrigan what he would have used, and this leads to a short but explosive standoff in which Corrigan yells, “I don’t know! Okay? I don’t fucking know!” The fact that his brother curses stuns Ciaran, and Corrigan is instantly ashamed. Ciaran delights for a moment in the fact that his brother has a flaw so major it simply cannot be contained. He determines that Corrigan wants to take on other people’s pain but cannot deal with his own. Then he too feels shame for deriving pleasure from Corrigan’s unhappiness. The two brothers tersely make up with one another, apologizing for what they said.

Days pass, and Ciaran slowly acclimates to life in the Bronx and the housing projects, though he remains uncomfortable about the prostitutes, especially the way they are always high on heroin and sauntering into the apartment. During the day Corrigan drives a van to a nursing home and takes elderly people for rides to the park, allowing them some outdoor time. Ciaran accompanies him. One day, after dropping the elderly off at the nursing home again, Corrigan tells Ciaran that he has another job to do—but he won’t disclose what it is. Corrigan leaves Ciaran at the projects and then drives away. He doesn’t return until late that night looking thin and exhausted.

Several days later another monk from the Order arrives in the projects. He is clearly taken aback by the tough environment and is robbed by gunpoint in the elevator on his second day. Afterward, he sits and prays in the apartment for two straight days. Corrigan finds him too serious, too simple-minded when it comes to God. “It’s like he’s got a toothache and he wants God to cure it,” he says. One day Jazzlyn sits in the monk’s lap and flirts with him, an event that sends him into immediate and fervent prayer followed by a torrent of tears. Corrigan asks around and is able to retrieve the monk’s stolen passport, and he drives him to the airport to leave New York once and for all.

Still struggling to accept the presence of the prostitutes in his brother’s apartment, Ciaran begins locking the door. When Corrigan asks him to leave it unlocked, the two brothers have a tense conversation in which Ciaran finds out that Tillie is Jazzlyn’s mother. This appalls him, and he finally breaks down and yells at his brother, roundly criticizing his life and values, saying that he is only “placating his conscience” by pretending to help these lost souls. Corrigan does not yell back. He merely replies, “Just leave the door open,” before leaving the apartment.

Ciaran runs outside after his brother has left. He passes a man teaching a dog to bite, and without wanting to, he thinks, “Nigger.” This thought is followed by the feeling that the Bronx will ruin him. He wonders how Corrigan can stand it.

When Corrigan comes home late that night, he is lethargic and his eyes lazily roll in their sockets. Ciaran’s bags are packed and he is ready to leave, but Corrigan sets to work taking the locks off the door. Ciaran watches his brother work, and when Corrigan rolls up his sleeve, Ciaran sees markings on his arm—he suddenly feels that things have become clear to him, and assumes that Corrigan is now a heroin user.

For the most part, Ciaran is not surprised that his brother is using heroin. He figures that it is the same thing he did as a child when he used to drink with Dublin’s alcoholics; “If he couldn’t cure it, he took it on.” The next day, without much thought to it, Ciaran decides to stay.

Ciaran once again accompanies Corrigan as he drives the elderly around. In picking them up, he meets Adelita, a nurse at the home for whom Corrigan has an obvious affinity. Throughout the day Ciaran asks Corrigan questions about heroin, trying to gauge his brother’s response. Finally, at the end of the day, he asks Corrigan if he’s been using the drug. Astonished, Corrigan responds convincingly that he would never even go near the substance. What’s really been occupying him, he explains, is the fact that he has fallen in love with Adelita.

It is evening when Corrigan parks the car and fills his brother in on the real story. It turns out that he has a rare blood condition known as TTP (Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura), which Adelita diagnosed him with. Corrigan had been helping move furniture into the nursing home when Adelita noticed that his arms were severely bruised. He had ignored these blotches because he had recently been beaten up by a pimp and had chalked up his injuries to the violence. But Adelita pushed her finger into a bruise and said, “You’ve got TTP,” a condition she knew about from studying to be a doctor at night. In Guatemala, her original home, she was a nurse and almost a doctor, but none of her credentials transferred when she moved to the United States. Corrigan takes her advice and has a doctor examine him and it turns out that she was right: he has TTP.

Corrigan explains that the idea of being sick doesn’t bother him very much, though the initial experience threw him into a struggle with his faith. He felt as if he was losing God. In the nursing home one day Adelita started asking him about his treatment, and then she began rubbing the inside of his arm, saying how important it was to keep the blood flowing. Corrigan was overcome by her touch. He implored himself to rise above the pleasure, to act holy and to not succumb to romance’s temptation. But he let it happen, unable to resist. When he left, he drove aimlessly for hours on end until he reached Montauk, where he looked out at the ocean, hoping for some sort of revelation, which never came. Upon returning to the Bronx, Corrigan closed himself into his room, locked the door, and ignored the prostitutes’ knocks until, worrying that he had died, they summoned the police to break down his door.

Continuing his story, Corrigan tells Ciaran that Tillie, Jazzlyn, and Angie threw a “not-dead” party for him, which he decided to take “as a sign.” But then, to his own dismay, he found himself returning to the nursing home and asking Adelita to rub his arm again. While she rubbed his arm, he kissed her. After that, he started going to her house to visit her and her two kids. He frequently made up excuses to go—telling himself that he was going over to help the kids with their homework—but they refrained from sleeping together, since, after all, he was still in the Order and had taken a vow of celibacy, which Adelita respected.

Once Corrigan has unloaded this information about his love for Adelita, he feels somewhat freed. In the following days he goes to the nursing home as much as possible in order to visit her, and she starts coming to his apartment, where the two of them insist that Ciaran stay, as if his presence provides an appropriate separation between them so that they remain faithful to Corrigan’s vows. Corrigan is at once overjoyed and distraught, feeling ultimately that he has fallen from grace. Still, he can’t commit to either leaving the Order or leaving Adelita.

Ciaran gets a job as a bartender in Queens. One night on his way home he sees Tillie underneath the expressway in the Bronx. She comes over to him, putting her arm through his and saying, “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home,” which Ciaran recognizes as a line from the thirteenth century Persian poet Rumi. She sees his surprise and explains that her husband studied Persian poetry. Ciaran looks at her, astounded. She tells him to get himself together, saying that the man was actually her ex-husband. Suddenly, Ciaran finds himself wanting to kiss her. Just then, Tillie’s pimp pulls up in a car, and she tells him that Ciaran has already paid for her services. At this, they slink away and have sex.

A police raid occurs early one morning, the cops rounding up the prostitutes in great numbers and arresting them. Corrigan is incensed. He demands to know where the women are being taken, but the police only make fun of him. Eventually they push him to the side and make him stand on the curb. On his way inside, Corrigan picks up a key ring that Jazzlyn dropped. It bears pictures of her two daughters. Ciaran tries to tell his brother that they will get the women later, but Corrigan shows him the key ring, saying that it is the reason they have to act now; Jazzlyn’s children have been left alone.

Corrigan asks Ciaran to pick up the elderly patients from the nursing home while he goes downtown to the precinct where Jazzlyn and Tillie are being held because of an outstanding warrant for a robbery they committed together. Corrigan suggests that Ciaran take the elderly patients to the beach. Ciaran agrees and Corrigan leaves. It is then that Ciaran realizes that Corrigan took the van; he rents a different van and goes to pick up the residents.

Adelita, who has her children with her, helps Ciaran take the elderly residents to the beach. Once they get there, Ciaran starts asking Adelita questions in an attempt to discern whether or not she cares as much about Corrigan as he cares about her. Offended by his questioning, she eventually reassures him that her love for his brother is genuine and that she respects him, making it clear that she would never force him to leave the Order and then subsequently leave him.

Tillie takes the blame for the robbery, and Jazzlyn is released. Corrigan is there to take her home. On the ride back to the Bronx, however, they get into a car crash on the FDR Drive. A car rear-ends Corrigan’s van, sending it out of control. Jazzlyn flies through the windshield and is flung into the air, landing far from the van in a crumpled heap, instantly dead. Corrigan ends up smashed down under the steering wheel, his body pressing against the accelerator and the brake pedals at the same time. He is still breathing. The only belongings left behind—other than the van itself—are one of Jazzlyn’s yellow stilettos and a Bible that fell overtop it from the glove compartment. At first, the paramedics think Corrigan is dead and load him into a truck with Jazzlyn, but then he coughs a small bubble of blood and he is rushed to the hospital.

Unaware of the accident Corrigan and Jazzlyn have been in, Ciaran and Adelita finish their day at the beach. Ciaran drops everyone off and drives back to the projects. At two in the morning a knock sounds on the door, and a woman comes into the room with the news that Jazzlyn has been in a crash. Ciaran bounds out of the apartment and gets in the van, driving directly to Adelita’s, who brings her children along to the hospital.

At the hospital Ciaran and Adelita find Corrigan while Adelita’s children sit in the waiting room. Frantic, they pull their chairs close to Corrigan. He is trying to speak. He whispers that he’s seen something beautiful. Adelita leans down to him and Corrigan continues whispering to her. Ciaran asks what he’s saying, and she replies that it is nonsense. Blood bubbles at his mouth. Adelita says he’s hallucinating, says that he claims to have seen something beautiful. Ciaran asks if his brother wants a priest. Corrigan tries to lift his head. Weeping gently, Adelita touches him; “Oh,” she says, “his forehead’s cold. His forehead’s very cold.”