Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Rather it is the story of the people on the ground and what it is like to be implicated in a freedom they can never attain. Let the Great World Spin is not Man on Wire it is not the story of Philippe Petit, whom McCann inhabits but never names not the story of another dancer suspended, by force of miracle, in thin air. His method, which he has practiced in novel after novel and is now all his own, is to find a figure who offers the image of perfect freedom - who seems beyond history itself - and then to use that figure to deliver his characters to their fates. As he did in his great Dancer, in which he managed to rewrite the Russian novel through the rebellion of Rudolf Nureyev, McCann uses Let the Great World Spin to strand a wide cast of characters between gravity and grace and to make each member of a historical chorus sing all alone. Indeed, Let the Great World Spin is a birth certificate chiseled on a tombstone, and, as such, it's not so much a historical novel as it is a novel about history - about how it works.

Save for a rueful coda set in 2006, it is a novel about beginnings rather than endings, and yet, like downtown New York itself, it is shadowed by a shadow no longer there, and one can scarcely imagine it being written without that opportunity for rue. Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (Random House, $25) takes place on August 7, 1974, the day that Philippe Petit walked on a high wire between the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, then freshly erupted and now forever effaced.

Now into this landscape comes a book that is not a 9/11 novel or a post-9/11 novel, but rather a pre-9/11 novel. The narrative of the Un-American Century is that there is no central narrative, and, thanks to the self-expanding and story-diminishing technology available on the Internet, that's how we like it. For the most part, American readers have rejected the notion that any one writer can tell about an event they had to live through. And yet the dream of a novel that unifies the culture around an event that wound up cleaving it is just another of those things that hasn't quite worked out for this country in the Un-American Century. Before the bone fragments were harvested from Ground Zero, or any of the accidental monuments desanctified by their eventual inclusion in a Staten Island landfill, writers of American fiction were challenged to write about the Day Everything Changed. We are familiar by now with the 9/11 novel - with the idea of it, anyway.

Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann