Is the aerialist a version of the novelist?: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann does manage to pull it off - ties up the various strands of his complex novel "Let the Great World Spin" in the last section of Book 3, and I won't give it all away but this section is the life story of the Bronx neighbor who adopts the two children left behind when Jazz dies in the car crash and Tillie goes to jail. This section is a fine brief portrait of a life - there are several in this book, and each could stand alone as a novella - though perhaps a little soft and sentimental at the end. Tying together the disparate lives is a bit of a device, a bit artificial, and requires McCann to stretch the lines of probability. There is one further short section (book 4) that takes place, I think, closer to present day. Still wondering how effective the tightrope theme is and what to make of its significance. As noted in an earlier post, movies that use this multiple-strands-intersect technique have lately used the metaphor of a car crash (Crash, Lantana), literally smashing people's lives together. And a car crash is at the center of this novel as well, and, oddly, it occurs to me that McCann could have written the whole story without the aerialist. But the aerialist does bring a dimension of strangeness and beauty to this story, a sense of the great city united by a single, mysterious event. It's uplifting and dramatic, and of course includes the symbolism of thin strands connecting across space and the one daring to walk across those strands, much like a novelist. And also: the terrible foreshadowing of a city blown apart (the last section may take on this theme).