What Colum MCann (Let the Great World Spin) has in common with Chaucer

Started Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," which won an NBA last year (whatever its merits, I assume it helps your award chances if you set your novel in nyc at an iconic new york moment) and in early pages it definitely promises to live up to its reputation. His writing is sharp and clear, he sets the opening scene - on the ground as Petite traverses on the wire between the WTC towers far overhead - very skillfully, and then steps back into the heart of the novel, building the life story of a young man in an impoverished Dublin family circa 1950. It's easy to discern the structure of this book, even if you hadn't read a word about it: McCann is writing about a number of people on ground level on this stirring day, their life stories, and their life intersections - a technique that goes way back, you could say it goes back to The Canterbury Tales, in which a seemingly random selection of individuals brought together by chance stands in as a portrait for an entire society at a moment in history; also draws on more Modern Lit tradition, think particularly of Mrs. Dalloway and of course Ulysses, set in one day, different characters interact and cross paths, creating a portrait of a city and a time (also note how in Mrs. Dalloway much of the focus is on airplane/s traversing overhead - ominous presentiment of aerial attack?). McCann seems to be one of those writers who slowly built a corpus unrecognized and then is placed in the forefront by one fine novel that gets attention - I hope for him this means that readers are discovering all of his works.