JC: Have you seen the documentary about Petit’s walk, ‘Man on Wire’?ĬMcC: I was about two years into my novel when I suddenly heard there was going to be a documentary and I was like, ‘OK! Well, there’s going to be a documentary.’ Then I heard there was going to be a really good documentary. It was very shortly after 9/11 that I re-remembered it and started thinking about it over the next couple of years - to see if it would work just on its own as a story and see if it would work as an allegory, you know? It seemed to me that his walk had been an act of creation, in opposition to the act of destruction that had happened. Almost immediately after 9/11, when the towers came down, I remembered the essay, I remembered the fact that somebody had walked up there. I thought it was a spectacular feat, and they seemed to have a very strong relationship, Paul Auster and Petit.

I sort of stored it at the back of my memory. 11, I read Paul Auster’s ‘The Red Notebook,’ and in that book there was an essay about Philippe Petit. How did you come to know about his feat - was it something that you’d heard about when it happened that stayed with you?Ĭolum McCann: A good few years ago, long before Sept. Jacket Copy: Philippe Petit’s walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 is at the center of your novel. 11, is nominated for the National Book Award he talked to Jacket Copy from his home office in New York. McCann’s novel, which echoes with resonances of Sept. Their lives intersect, however obliquely, through Philippe Petit’s astonishing highwire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. See About archive blog posts.Ĭolum McCann’s novel ‘ Let the Great World Spin’ is set in New York in 1974, with a wide array of characters: hookers under a freeway overpass in the Bronx, an Irishman living in the projects nearby who is kind to them without ever telling them he’s a monk an affluent Park Avenue matron who’s lost in grief an ambitious teen photographer obsessed with subway taggers a group of early computer programmers. This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links.

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