Let the Great World Spin: Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Lara Liveman and her husband Blaine are driving out of New York City on the FDR Drive. Blaine, who is driving, has just lit a joint, and they are both coming down from a night of intense partying in the city. With their antique 1920s-era car, they rear-end a van in front of them, which is sent careening across the lanes.

As cocaine still moves through her bloodstream from the night before, Lara watches the van spin out of control, noting the driver’s bewildered face as the steering wheel spins through his hands. She wonders what he thinks when he looks at her and sees that she is dressed in flapper-era clothes. She then notices bare feet propped on the van’s dashboard—the insteps white and vulnerable—and then the woman’s face to whom they belong; she is in the passenger seat, and her face is young and calm. Lara thinks that this woman’s eyes travel across her own, “as if asking, What are you doing, you tan blond bitch in your billowy blouse and your fancy Cotton Club Car?”

The van spins out and hits a newspaper truck, but Lara and Blaine’s car moves steadily forward without harm. Looking over his shoulder for an instant, Blaine presses the accelerator and speeds away until Lara pleads with him to stop. He pulls over on the side of the road, where the two of them step out of the car and survey the crash from afar.

Lara has the clear thought that this crash will destroy her relationship with Blaine, perhaps most of all because of the fact that he seems more concerned with the damage done to their car than with the terrible tragedy they have just inflicted upon strangers. Although she feels terrible for what has happened, she looks at Blaine and tells him to get back in the car, saying that they should quickly leave the scene.

At this point we learn that Lara and Blaine have for the past year been living outside the city in a small cabin on a lake. They removed themselves from city life to escape a pattern of drug use and partying that had worn them down over the years. They are both artists and have taken up painting in the style of the 1920s, deciding to live off the grid to focus on their craft while also giving up drugs and alcohol. This trip was their first return to the city, where they hoped to sell some of their paintings. Despite their ambitions, though, nobody was interested in their work, and they ended up spending most of the visit binging on drugs once again.

Upon returning to the cabin, Blaine puts the car in a shed and sweeps the tracks out of the dirt. Then he and Lara sit on the dock and snort the dwindling amount of cocaine left over from their visit to the city. Lara is distraught by what happened on the FDR, but Blaine is adamant that it was not their fault. He urges her to drop the matter, pointing out that she was, after all, the one who told him to flee the scene of the accident. At this remark, Lara slaps him across the face and goes inside. Blaine eventually follows her and finds her facedown on the bed. He lifts back the bed sheets and sprinkles cocaine onto Lara’s back; he snorts it off of her bare skin, and then they have sex.

Lara awakes early the next day and steps outside without waking Blaine. She sees that they forgot to take the paintings inside the night before, and now they are sitting propped against the shed, ruined by rain. She does not tell Blaine what has happened, avoiding him throughout the day as he fervently licks the plastic bag for any remnants of cocaine that might be left.

The following morning, Lara walks into town and enters a diner. She feels out of place and senses an energy of sorts coming from the men sitting on stools at the other end of the room. She wonders whether or not Blaine has found the paintings yet and thinks about what he might do when he does. Across the room, a man unfolds his newspaper and Lara sees President Richard Nixon’s face on the front page. The waitress comes to take her order and tells her that Nixon has resigned.

The thought of Nixon brings something else to Lara’s mind: she remembers a boy she’d been in love with before Blaine. He went to Vietnam and came back in a wheelchair. To her surprise, though, he then campaigned for Nixon in 1968. Lara wonders now what would have happened if she had stayed with him. She remembers that the boy once wrote her a letter after watching one of Blaine’s antiwar art films. The letter said that the film had made him laugh so hard that he fell out of his wheel chair and now he couldn’t get up. It ended with the line, “Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry.”

Lara finds a newspaper on the floor. It is open to an article about the tightrope walker. She flips through the pages, looking for anything about a car crash on the FDR Drive, but there is nothing of the sort. Still, though, Lara can’t shake the image of the woman in the passenger seat who stared at her as the van skidded toward destruction.

Outside the diner, Blaine pulls up in the car. He joins Lara at her table and tells her that he found the paintings. He’s excited and full of smiles. Lara tells him that Nixon has resigned, but he doesn’t pay much attention to what she says. She apologizes that the paintings got left in the rain, but Blaine says they’re even better now. He says the rain changed the paintings, giving them different endings. Lara is unable to care; “That girl was killed,” she says. They have yet another argument about the accident, with Blaine urging her to forget the entire ordeal. He tells her that they need to focus on the paintings, and that they should document their new artistic process. After arguing some more, they leave the diner.

Later—perhaps the next day—Lara drives alone back to the city. She goes to a hospital and asks if there was a man and woman that came in on the previous Wednesday after a car crash. Thinking she’s a relative, a hospital worker gives Lara the left-behind belongings: a pair of black pants, a black shirt, an undershirt, underwear, socks, a religious medal, sneakers, a ticket for illegal parking in Lower Manhattan at 7:44 AM on August 7th, a bag of tobacco, cigarette papers, some money, a lighter, a key ring with the picture of two black girls, and the driver’s license of John A. Corrigan.

Lara learns that the girl she’d seen in the passenger’s seat died before reaching the hospital and that Corrigan died shortly after arriving. Lara drives away from the hospital in tears. Her original reason for coming to the city had been to buy a video camera to document Blaine’s new painting series, but now she finds herself driving toward the Bronx. When she arrives, several police officers—after warning her that she is in a rough neighborhood—direct her to Corrigan’s apartment, where she meets Ciaran and Adelita.

Lara lies and says that she works for the hospital and that she is returning Corrigan’s belongings. When she finds out that Ciaran is about to leave for Jazzlyn’s funeral, she asks if she can accompany him. He shrugs, clearly confused, but does not object.

When she arrives at the cemetery, Lara parks the car out of sight. At the ceremony she stands next to Ciaran while the preacher speaks. Looking through the crowd, she identifies Tillie as Jazzlyn’s mother; she is handcuffed and weeping. Lara also notices a mean-looking man standing at the back of the crowd, and the implication is that he is a pimp. Halfway through the service, Tillie yells at him, saying, “Get the fuck out, Birdhouse.” When he finally leaves, the entire funeral procession cheers.

At one point during the funeral, Tillie gets up to speak. She tells a story about how when Jazzlyn was ten she used to collect pictures of castles from magazines. One day, years later, Jazzlyn told Corrigan about her fantasy of living in a castle, and he said that he used to know castles like the ones she admired; he had seen them in Ireland. After that, he would come out every day and bring her coffee and tell her that he was getting her castle ready. This story eventually devolves into sadness as Tillie breaks down, saying that she was a bad mother, that she let Jazzlyn shoot up heroin. She then asks the crowd where her grandchildren are, and they tell her that the girls are being cared for.

Tillie approaches Ciaran and asks him if he remembers what they did together. Then the other women—the other prostitutes in the procession who were close to Corrigan—come to him and hug him. Ciaran reaches into his pocket and produces the key ring with the pictures of Tillie’s grandchildren. He gives it to Tillie and she studies it for a moment before slapping Ciaran across the face. Lara notes that it seems as if he is grateful for this slap. She wonders what kind of complicated situation she has placed herself in the middle of.

When the funeral ends, Lara offers Ciaran a ride home. He accepts, and when he sees the car’s smashed frontend, he knows that it is the car that sent his brother to his death. He asks if she was the one driving, and she says yes, though it is a lie. By this point they are sitting in the car together. He asks why she didn’t stop, and as she thinks of an answer, another car pulls into the lot and starts trying to parallel park behind them, eventually tapping Lara’s car with its back bumper. The driver comes out ready to defend his actions, but Lara waves him away, and he hesitantly rushes off, looking back now and again as he goes.

Finally answering Ciaran’s question, Lara says she doesn’t know why she didn’t stop after hitting Corrigan’s van. She tells him that there is no explanation. He thinks this over, then tells her he needs to get away from the cemetery and asks her to drop him off. When she asks him where he wants to be taken, he asks if she wants to get a drink somewhere. It is clear to both of them that there is something very complicated between them. She accepts his invitation, and they go to a bar.

When Lara arrives home later that night, she goes swimming in the lake while Blaine waits for her on the dock. Back in the cabin, he tries to get her to come to bed with him, but she refuses. It seems that his painting experiment is off to a bad start. Lara, on the other hand, is slightly renewed, and as Blaine sleeps, she stays up sketching at the kitchen table. She realizes in that moment that she wants to leave him.

Lara narrates in greater detail the specifics of her time with Ciaran. They drove to a bar, avoiding the FDR. Ciaran told her about his childhood, about how his mother used to play piano for them. As she drove to the bar, Lara saw a kid spray-painting a bridge, and this made her think of Blaine’s work. At the bar they talked about Corrigan, and at one point Lara confessed that she hadn’t been the one driving the car that killed him. Ciaran leaned across the table, kissed her, and said that he had sensed this all along. When Lara decided to leave, she looked back through the window at Ciaran, who was drinking the remaining two drinks. He looked up and she turned away quickly. The chapter concludes with her assertion: “There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.”