I was just in New York City during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. For the remembrance of the day, two huge light columns blazed into the night sky to replicate the twin towers. In Let the Great World Spin,
the twin towers are in their infancy. They are looked upon by the critics as "the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world." That is until the French acrobat, Philippe Petit, strung 210 feet of braided cable from tower to tower 110 stories up. Then he walked across. As McCann tells us, Petit, "was pureness moving..He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air." (In an eerie "premonition", while Petit is walking between the towers, someone from below takes a picture of a jetliner crossing in back of him which looks as if the plane is flying into the tower.) The tight rope walk of Petit is the fulcrum of this novel. It is, in a way, a novel of six degrees of separation. It really reminds me of the movie Crash. It is a novel that brings back unpleasant memories for NYC and the times...the raging debate over the Vietnam war, the resignation of Nixon, the decaying of a great city ridden with crime and trash, and the burgeoning of drug use. Read more...
