We are familiar by now with the 9/11 novel—with the idea of it, anyway. 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. 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. For the most part, American readers have rejected the notion that any one writer can tell them about an event they had to live through. 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.

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. 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. ... (Read the full review)

Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who in 1974 walked across a tightrope between the twin towers, wasn’t on the payroll of the Port Authority, but in retrospect he probably should have been. At the time, the newly opened World Trade Center was shaping up as a huge mistake. Not only had the project cost far more than it was supposed to, but a city spiraling toward bankruptcy didn’t exactly need millions more square feet of office space. Worse still, the towers were out of scale and utterly unattractive—“the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world,” as one critic put it. They were the ugly stepchild of New York’s skyscrapers, seemingly destined to be forever denied a place in the life and lore of the city. But in the span of a single summer morning, Petit gave the towers a history of their own. His stunt represented nothing less than a symbolic passing of the torch: in the remake of King Kong two years later, the furious, lovelorn gorilla takes his last stand not astride the Empire State Building but atop the World Trade Center.

For all the hoopla that greeted Petit’s walk, it was largely forgotten until 9/11, when it was rediscovered amid the sudden nostalgia for all things twin towers. There was Petit’s own memoir about the walk, To Reach the Clouds, as well as a memorable New Yorker cover on the fifth anniversary of the attacks and an Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire. Now Colum McCann has repurposed Petit’s daring act as the leitmotif for Let the Great World Spin, one of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years. ... (Read the full review)

One of the great intriguing truisms about American life is the way that, for all our inherent social conservatism, we are still always dazzled by anyone who engages in a high-wire act. Being a country which promotes the cult of rugged individualism alongside a corporate ethic which so profoundly encourages conformism, the United States has always exulted in acts of derring-do which astound and confound. Whether it be the kid who wins eight gold medals in an Olympic swimming pool, or that neo-fascist who survived the first solo transatlantic flight, or that “one small step for mankind” moment on our lunar sphere, Americans love saluting anyone who, so to speak, defies gravity.

Which is why, in August 1974, when a French acrobat with the nom juste of Philippe Petit stepped out on to a cable stretched between the two towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Centre, the nation was gobsmacked. This was a dance with death that was also pure acrobatic art. Or, at Colum McCann so elegantly encapsulates this event in his wonderful new novel, “Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt to walk . . . The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air”.

McCann himself is a writer who doesn’t fear high-wire acts. ... (Read the full review)

Bret Anthony Johnston: First, congratulations on Let the Great World Spin being named a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction! Do you recall the inception of the book? Was there any image or incident or memory that triggered the writing process?

Colum McCann: Thanks so much. One only has to look down the roll-call of nominees through the years to realize what an incredible honor it is. It’s humbling and thrilling.

As for the writing process, it’s hard to say where anything really begins or ends, isn’t it? I suppose the novel itself is a contemplation of what it means for life to be unfinished. Things spin. We are made by what we have been, and at the same time we become what we desire. This past and present is braided together with a beauty and an uncertainty. ... (Read the full interview)