What's Popular Fiction to do with a Christ Figure?

The answer to the question posed in the headline of this post is: Either martyr him (without a resurrection) or have his love come to full blossom in a romantic relationship. In Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann does both with his Christ-like character Corrigan. Corrigan -- or Corrie to the prostitutes whom he serves -- is an Irish monk who comes to the Bronx to live among addicts, pimps and the elderly poor. He is wonderfully limned as humane, at times conflicted and genuinely in love with Jesus. Did McCann know such a priest growing up in Dublin? I hope so.

In the end -- or really the middle of the book -- Corrie falls in love with a woman from Guatemala and shortly thereafter is killed in a car crash while giving a young woman a ride home from a prostitution-related court case. To me, it seems McCann's imagination about the religious life ran dry so he terminated the Corrigan character using both of Hollywood's endings for Christ figures. There is something of a resurrection with one of the young woman's orphaned daughters being adopted and "making it" with a Yale education.

But I quibble.

Let the Great World Spin is a novel that does it job. I came to recognize the characters' voices; I became invested in their outcomes; I laughed out loud a couple times and felt a lump grow in my throat as I took in the scene of a meeting of mothers whose sons were killed in Vietnam (Lord, let all my sons bury me!).

The structure of the novel is epic, although not quite it's length (it has a Loc count of 6532 on the Kindle running on an iPad mini, whatever that means). It follows about a dozen protagonists whose stories swirl around a historical event -- Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the (former) World Trade Center's twin towers. I give McCann credit for developing each one so quickly. People who actually read more than two novels a year could probably name the genre for such writing, along with numerous examples. I will give one similitude. I read it in a college English course 15 years ago. It's E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime. From what I remember, it's kinda similar. There, I'll end my literary criticism.

Corrie is just one "main" character among many, so my opening critique says more about me than the book. Another character is also delightful. Gloria is raised in an educated, working class black family in the Midwest. She comes to New York for college. After two marriages and the death of her son in Vietnam, she ends up poor in the Bronx. With the financial support of a rich white friend, who also lost her only son in Vietnam, she adopts the daughter of the prostitute killed in the car crash with Corrie (see it all comes together!) and raises the girl to go to Yale (the small resurrection in Corrie's story). It's a great mini-plot, but even more compelling are the thoughts and words of this woman, Gloria, who navigates the world of white people, tragedy and eight (I believe) muggings in her life. In the end she is used by God to redeem many lives -- at least that's how I read it. Her name is, after all, Gloria.