REBUILDING AN ICON, WORD BY WORD
In June 2009, Let the Great World Spin appeared on bookshelves. With its publication, author Colum McCann returned a national symbol, The World Trade Center, back to its owners: the citizens of the United States.
It was a courageous act of imaginative recovery and repair. Hijackers on 9/11 destroyed a national symbol of capitalism and transformed it into an international icon of American hopelessness and helplessness.
McCann, working word by word, and phrase by phrase, used the mystery of language to rebuild The World Trade Center into a national memorial to hope and redemption. His book won the 2009 National Book Award.
McCann was living in Manhattan in 2001. His father-in-law was working at The World Trade Center on 9/11. He escaped safely. The Dublin born writer aspired to write a novel about 9/11, wanted to examine his adopted city, hoped to meld fact and fiction into a gripping narrative about the unbounded potential of the human spirit. His solution was as ingenious as it was audacious.
The centerpiece of the novel is the real life story of a daring acrobatic performance which riveted New York City on August 7, 1974. In the early morning darkness Philippe Petit and his cronies snuck into the partially finished colossus in south Manhattan and headed for the roof.
Using technology straight out of Greek mythology, they shot an arrow from a hunting bow to get rope to co-conspirators on the other tower roof. They pulled a wire taut between the towers and Petit stepped out onto that wire-thin barrier between life and death.
He performed a 40 minute show for the growing crowd of New Yorkers over 1,350 feet below. They were mesmerized and with good reason. He leapt, he danced and he astonished those far below. He wore no safety harness. There was no net to catch him.
McCann’s brilliance shines in using Petit’s dance in the heavens to illuminate the lives of over a dozen fictional characters who witness it. An Irish priest chases redemption by helping prostitutes get through their days of squalor and menace. He sees a divine angel on the wire.
A support group of grieving mothers who lost sons in Vietnam wrestle with Petit, a man who cheapens life by taunting death. A computer whiz-kid on the west coast, hacks into the phone system, wanting to get an eye witness account from a slightly bemused librarian who picks up the ringing pay phone, foreshadowing with subtle humor the Internet to come.
Story lines interweave and stray off, only to always come back to the artist floating on a wire. The novel is sprawling and hugely ambitious while covering both only a single day and only a relatively slight 349 pages. A post script takes readers to 2006 and our post 9/11 world.
The book transformed me, but I cannot explain how McCann wove his magic in me.
After 9/11, I dreaded seeing photos of the World Trade Center. The image always took me back to that horrific day and I would fall into a well of sadness that had no bottom. The hijackers defined the symbol for me.
After finishing Let the Great World Spin, I saw the world in a new way: this is the essential purpose of literature. When I see photos now, I start to fall into that well of sadness but, in my mind’s eye I suddenly see a Frenchman on a wire. The silhouette represents both the acrobat who defied gravity and the immigrant writer who defied the hijackers’ determination to destroy hope.
I regain my balance and I do not fall into that well of sadness. I am hopeful again.
Petit and McCann are both immigrants. They see America through the unique lens of adoption. Native born Americans can take this country for granted. Immigrants aren’t blinded by a birthright.
Petit’s physical fearlessness created what has been called the greatest artistic crime of the last century. McCann’s creative fearlessness in this century sculpted a work of hope and redemption out of the twisted wreckage of The World Trade Center.
We thought the hijackers robbed us of a national symbol. We were wrong. The hijackers borrowed it for awhile. With publication of Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann gave us back The World Trade Center. He gave us back our hope.
We all owe this Irish immigrant a debt of gratitude.
