The soul of a city
By Jonathan Mahler |
August 9, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
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 meters 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.
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.
McCann makes little effort to hew to the facts of Petit's story; he doesn't even name the wire walker. But the author appears to have remained faithful to the stunt's larger truths.
Like Petit, McCann's acrobat doesn't simply focus on safely crossing braided cable, 110 stories up; he dances joyously among the clouds, reveling in his fleeting moment of human transcendence: "He was pureness moving. ... He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air."
The walk is really little more than a cultural touchstone and a literary conceit, the event around which McCann has assembled his cast. But the metaphorical possibilities of the walker ¨? the paradox of this innocent, unsanctioned act of "divine delight" being carried out between two buildings that would one day be so viciously and murderously destroyed ¨? are hard to ignore, particularly in a novel so concerned with the twin themes of love and loss.
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 meters 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.
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.
McCann makes little effort to hew to the facts of Petit's story; he doesn't even name the wire walker. But the author appears to have remained faithful to the stunt's larger truths.
Like Petit, McCann's acrobat doesn't simply focus on safely crossing braided cable, 110 stories up; he dances joyously among the clouds, reveling in his fleeting moment of human transcendence: "He was pureness moving. ... He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air."
The walk is really little more than a cultural touchstone and a literary conceit, the event around which McCann has assembled his cast. But the metaphorical possibilities of the walker ¨? the paradox of this innocent, unsanctioned act of "divine delight" being carried out between two buildings that would one day be so viciously and murderously destroyed ¨? are hard to ignore, particularly in a novel so concerned with the twin themes of love and loss.
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