How the past saw the future that is now the present: Let the Great World Spin

First section/book of Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin" ends with interpolated section describing Petit's training for the walk across the towers of the WTC; though McCann moves the training site to the American West, the routine itself will be familiar to those who've seen Petit's documentary, Man on Wire. Not sure whether McCann had seen it when he was writing this section - does feel like familiar ground to me. Second section begins with more people whose lives intersected with the events of that day, notably a young photographer who captured a good picture of Petit crossing the wire (with ominous plane crossing overhead) - picture actually included in the book. Then a section on some computer hackers from Palo Alto who tap into a payphone circuit and are able to talk to some people on the ground watching the events. Did this happen? Very possible - it seems McCann may have culled newspapers for real events of the day and built his novel around the reimaginings of those events (this could be done for any day, I think - a R.I. writer did a novel about the day of Kennedy's assassination, and I think used some of the same techniques). The hacker section is kind of interesting because it reminds us of how primitive high-tech was back then, 35 years ago - and allows McCann to have a few of the hackers talk about their vision of the future when we would carry vast info around with us - seemed highly fantastic at the time but now we just take these capacities, ever growing, in stride. It's a look into the the past to see how the past saw the future that is now the present. Writing continues to be strong and clear, but starting to wonder about the coherence of the overall design of the novel - is McCann drawing the strands together or just laying them down side by side?