He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth – the filth, the war, the poverty – was that life could be capable of small beauties. “What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. Like Corrigan, an Irish Catholic priest who takes shut-ins to the park and brings coffee to the prostitutes in the Bronx and endures beatings from their pimps, McCann searches for the divine in some of the grimmer corners of New York.

McCann has more on his mind than “mere anarchy.” And unlike in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” this center holds. Everyone – from the judge who fined Petit a penny a floor and sentenced him to a children’s performance in Central Park, to the artist himself, who spent six years training for and planning his audacious feat – is touched, sometimes in heartbreaking ways, by the performance. Told from multiple points of view, McCann, who lives in New York, performs his own gravity-defying act, swooping from prostitutes to priests, drug-addled artists to grieving mothers as his story unfolds around that morning. That tragedy adds an automatic level of poignancy, as McCann harks back to a time when New Yorkers gazed up at the towers in amazement, rather than horror. Today’s readers cannot think “World Trade Center” without remembering Sept. Petit’s act of criminal artistry inspired this year’s Academy Award-winning documentary, “ Man on Wire.” Now, acclaimed writer Colum McCann (“Zoli”) uses “the man in the air” as the axis for his gritty yet hopeful new novel Let the Great World Spin. But no one has ever done so on the scale of Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who spent 45 minutes walking, hopping, and lying on a wire stretched 110 stories up between the World Trade Center towers on Aug.

Lots of people talk about working without a net.

Let the big world spin