There are no detectives in the book, really, but they gave me imaginative access, even though we’re talking about trying to imagine 35 years ago. Of course research is only that – background music. But I saw my first dead body in the “field” – a strange and disconcerting sight. We even copped what we thought was a murder one night, but it turned out to be something else, a guy who blew his heart out with cocaine. I went out on the beat with a lot of cops, including homocide detectives. Seriously, for many months I tried to imagine the life of Tillie – the 38 year old grandmother/hooker - but her voice was elusive.
Let the Great World Spin spans so many nooks and crannies of New York City – what research did you do for this book, for instance to learn about prostitutes in the Bronx?ĭo you really want to know?! I have a bit of an errant imagination, I suppose. You want people to finish the story and then immediately want to begin it again.Īnd maybe it’s just a novel about the polyphonic city … my love letter to old New York in all her clothes, shabby and dignified both. You also want it to be a rollicking good story. I’d argue that sort of sentiment necessary these days. I suppose it’s a novel that tries to uncover joy and hope and a small glimmer of grace. The book leapfrogs forward to 2006, where the present meets the past, and questions it, even authenticates it. It’s also a social novel that looks at the ongoing nature of our lives, how the accidental meets the eternal. A French editor has described the book as a sort of “New York Ulysses,” and maybe it fits in the sense that it mostly takes place on one day, and that it embraces the intricacy of the ordinary, but I’m very wary of the comparison of course, there’s only one Ulysses. It’s a collision, really, a web in this big sprawling complex web that we call New York. The lives braid in and out of each other. They accidentally dovetail in and out of each other’s lives on this one day – an Irish monk living in the housing projects, a Park Aveneu mother of a Vietnam vet/computer expert, a 38-year-old hooker in the Bronx, an errant artist who has lost her way, a subway tagger and so on. Instead of focussing on Petit, however, the book follows the intricate lives of a number of different people who live on the ground, or, rather, people who walk the ground’s tightrope. Most of it takes place on one day in New York in August 1974 when Phillipe Petit (unnamed in the book) makes his tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers, a walk that was called “the artistic crime of the 20 th century.” Well, on one hand it is a simple narrative of lives entwined in the early 1970’s. Tell us about your new novel, Let the Great World Spin.
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