More tellingly he is that rare species in contemporary fiction: a literary writer who is an exceptional storyteller. What is so admirable about McCann's novel is its canny construction - and the way he is able to interweave these tales (and the wildly disparate worlds they represent) with a stylistic aplomb that never comes across as flamboyant or attention-seeking. alias Sweetcakes - a hooker who also has a connection with that Irish monk who called the Bronx his parish. And there is Tillie Henderson alias Miss Bliss alias Puzzle alias Rosa P. There is an artist - caught between her once-hip downtown credentials and her new-found ascetic life in a Thoreau-like, electricity-less conditions beyond the city limits - whose life randomly (and violently) intersects with the Corrigan brothers. There's a Park Avenue matron - brilliantly educated, but living in her own luxurious bubble (her husband is a noted judge) - struggling with the death of her only child in Vietnam (not even a soldier, but something of a computer whizz) and finding herself crossing the city's economic divides in search of other mothers who have lost a child to that war. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air". 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. 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.
This was a dance with death that was also pure acrobatic art. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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