There are so few flaws in Colum McCann’s National Book Award-winning novel about humanity and grief that it’s difficult to find a toehold for comment. McCann’s agitated, love-hungry characters weave an emotional fabric so dense that it proves tricky to unravel and examine.

It’s tempting to try to find literal ties to events in this book Esquire bills as the “first great novel about 9/11.” Set in New York city in August of 1974, Let the Great World Spin loosely revolves around George Petit’s guerrilla tightrope walk, strung between the barely-completed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The novel’s characters stare up at Petit’s performance awestruck, his bravery (or hubris) impacting their own personal sagas.

It doesn’t quite start this way. Instead, gray and sleepy: We follow sort-of protagonist Ciaran and his mysterious, devout brother Corrigan through their hard-knocks but charming childhood in Dublin. It’s not until Corrigan makes a self-sacrificial plunge into grimmest urban purgatory—he absconds to The Bronx, performing ministrations and rest stop services for the local hookers—that we as readers also get initiated into the squalor, violence and pathos of 1970s New York City.

McCann’s characters are phenomenal. Even Christlike Corrigan is waylaid by physical love. Ciaran, steady and dutiful, is overwhelmed with unwanted racial prejudice at times. The central characters are all broken in just the right amount, just enough that we believe in them, not enough that we question their motivations.

Characters further from the center attenuate and begin to accrete bits of archetypes: arch-selfish untalented artist cokehead Blaine; smacked-out, vacant, neon-swimsuit-strap-snapping whore Jazzlyn; buzzed, brilliant, driven socially-retarded hackers. But that’s just fine. What McCann is doing here is building a human backdrop pattern. It’s our stars—Corrigan, Ciaran, grieving Claire and Gloria, judge Solomon, passionate Adelita—who are embroidered in elegant detail on top.

Petit, the tightrope walker himself, is developed here as more of a concept than any outwardly recognizable person. We join him on his obsessive training sessions, we hear him console and push himself, we see him prepare. But McCann gives us the feeling that he could be anyone, that he represents the focused dreams of humanity towards freedom and love.

The story’s characters rattle around and carom off of distraction and chance. Frantic self-doubt and the search for meaning taints and elevates them. It is not hard to find reason for this book to win awards: it’s a monumental success of a work.