Much of the attention surrounding Colum McCann's extraordinary new novel "Dancer" has focused on its exploration of famed dancer Rudolf Nureyev. But this book is also about the nature of celebrity, the Cold War, art, sex and AIDS. Somehow, McCann - a Dublin native and Pushcart, Rooney and Hennessy prize winner - manages to make this all as witty as it is powerful and profound.

Furthermore, though the international flavor of Dancer is strong, McCann gets a touch of the Irish in there as well, articulating anew the question first posed by William Butler Yeats: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Having previously studied the scars of Northern Ireland's Troubles in the claustrophobic "Everything in this Country Must," McCann takes a leap in time and space with "Dancer," covering 50 years and nearly as many characters.

Dancer begins with a wrenching, yet all-too-human portrait of Russian soldiers recovering from fighting in a World War II hospital. Rudolf Nureyev supposedly gave his first dance at such a facility at the age of 6. But ultimately, the famed dancer (who later defected to the West) is just one character, and arguably not even the most memorable in McCann's multi-layered novel.

Filled with voices, coming from the bleak Soviet landscape to the wild, drug-fueled night-life of New York in the decadent 1970s, Dancer is as much about the people who encountered Nureyev, casually or even accidentally, as it is about the dancer. Many readers will surely feel that it is the Venezuelan immigrant Victor who steals Nureyev's show. In an electric, one-sentence-long romp, Victor glides through New York in the 1970s. This is only one of the spellbinding scenes in what is certainly Colum McCann's most ambitious book to date. (335 pages / $26 / Metropolitan Books.)