In 1974, Philippe Petit became famous for stringing a cable between the tops of the two World Trade Center towers, a quarter mile above Manhattan's streets, and performing on it for about 45 minutes. Colum McCann's National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin is not exactly about this incredible moment in recent history (for that, check out Petit's memoir To Reach the Clouds, or the wonderful 2008 documentary Man on Wire, both available at CMPL); instead, it uses the tightrope walk as the novel's central event, the axis around which its many diverse characters rotate.
Rather than focusing on one or two central individuals, McCann skillfully inhabits the lives of multiple people, some for more time than others: mother and daughter prostitutes in the Bronx; a poor, devout Irish Catholic missionary who tends to them; a rich Manhattan judge and his wife who are mourning the loss of their son in Vietnam; an opera-loving law librarian (one of my favorites, though she makes only a brief appearance); and many more, each remarkably human. The characters are all wounded by something, or by many things, all struggling in their own way to make sense of the troubled world and to try to find their place in it. But what unites them, besides their shared city and the connections McCann spins between them, is a sense of hope. Their hope is represented, beautifully and simply, by the image of Petit improbably dancing in the air between the towers, an image that somehow reaches and touches each of them, even if indirectly.
This is a great and compassionate novel, full of wisdom, humanism and poetry. It's also a tribute to a great city, and readers who've had the fortune to spend much time there will immediately understand one of the characters when she says, "One of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it's yours."
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