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When aspiring authors ask sage, successful novelists how to create characters and predicaments that seem realistic, the answer often comes back: Write what you know.
Colum McCann, an Irish emigre to New York City, has just published his fifth novel, "Let the Great World Spin," which focuses on an Irish monk ministering in the Bronx. The book is about much more than that, of course. Most of the narrative is a kind of prelude to the 9/11 attacks, loosely organized around the French tightrope walker who captured the public's imagination when he traversed the gap between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in 1974. The book also tells the stories of a prostitute grandmother, an artist involved in an accident, and a group of mothers whose sons died in the Vietnam War. (McCann's work is often likened to that of James Joyce in its use of large casts of characters and parallel story lines.)
Still, McCann (above) often writes what he knows. Reviewing the new book in the Globe, Pulitzer-winning critic Richard Eder wrote, "New York City is Antaeus ground for Colum McCann: When he touches down, a surge of strength course up." McCann also had personal insights to 9/11. His father-in-law was working in the towers, narrowly escaped death, and showed up at McCann's front door covered in ashes. An earlier New York-based novel, "This Side of Brightness," chronicled the lives of the sandhogs who dug the city's subways, and did it so well that Eder called them McCann's "instrument of incantation."
McCann will discuss his new book on Thursday, July 9, at 7 p.m. at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. He'll return to the area in early August to teach a week-long seminar, "Writing What You Don't (Yet) Know," at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.