You Should Read TWIST by Colum McCann
Reading Notes
I read this book when it was released six months ago, but I procrastinated on writing a review. My intense admiration for this book demanded reverence, not just a summary with a few pull quotes. I spun myself into dizzy circles thinking about how to write about Twist. Then I flipped through the book to reread my favorite passages and came across this: “A writer’s craft is one that operates in fits and starts. Time swells outwards. You catch a voice and you run with it. The rags of language begin to fall into place” (166).
Colum McCann, through his narrator, was telling me that if I just got over myself and started to write the damn thing, I’d find my way through my muddled ideas. So here I go.
You should read Twist because I cannot stop thinking about it.
Anthony Fennell is an Irish writer doing his best to find a new story and stay away from alcohol. A self-identified “struggling novelist and occasional playwright,” he accepts a job as an embedded journalist on a cable repair ship. He’s not interested in cables until his editor explains their importance: “Most of us thought that the cloud was in the air, she said, but satellites accounted for only a trickle of internet traffic. The muddy wires at the bottom of the sea were faster, cheaper, and infinitely more effective than anything up there in the sky. On occasion the tubes broke, and there was a small fleet of ships in various ports around the world charged with repair, often spending months at sea” (6).
Fennell travels to Cape Town, South Africa, where he meets John Conway, the head of a ship docked in port and ready to leave at a moment’s notice, should a cable break. Fennell plays Nick Carraway to Conway’s Jay Gatsby. I suppose seeing allusions to The Great Gatsby could be considered an occupational hazard at this point. I've taught the novel to at least 30 different classes, and perhaps I see similarities to it for the same reason that when you buy a white car, you suddenly see white cars everywhere. Intentional or not, the two books are in conversation, but while The Great Gatsby challenges the American Dream, Twist tackles the global one. The marvels of modern communication pale when you consider, as Fennell does, that the cables lie along the old slave trade routes. Twist explores the consequences of colonialism and its distasteful, inevitable progeny: racism and discrimination.
A picture of the Pacific I took in Santa Barbara last March
Like Gatsby, Conway is an enigmatic figure who both welcomes Fennell and keeps him at an emotional distance, leaving Fennell to speculate about his motives and background. Conway’s partner, Zanele, is an actress who is about to leave for England, where she will perform in an unauthorized staging of Waiting for Godot. Fennell observes their unconventional relationship and reflects on his own broken promises and lost family. When an underwater avalanche snaps a cable, Conway and his crew head out to sea, where Fennell learns what it takes to maintain the fragile lines of connection that prop up our modern world.
Connection, or the lack thereof, is the heart of Twist. Fennell tends toward the lyrical, ruminating on the “[b]illions of pulses of light [that carry] words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, all shooting along the ocean floor, a flow of pulsating light” (10). Conway, on the other hand, takes a more practical view: “[W]e’re just fixing wires, man. Not the internet. I’m not responsible for the shit that happens out there. That’s someone else’s job” (80). But when Zanele’s play generates controversy and violence, Conway must confront the hatred that flows through the very cables he’s meant to repair.
My favorite picture of my favorite people on a San Diego Beach in December 2022
No wonder I’m drawn to this story. I spend my working days trying to convince teenagers that it really is in their best interest to put their phones away and engage in our time together. I spend my parenting hours trying to convince my crying tween that she does not need a phone, although most of her friends have phones (and have had them for years). I’ve watched The Social Dilemma; I’ve read Careless People and The Anxious Generation. And still, I have deleted Instagram from my phone as many times as I’ve re-installed it. I fall asleep to podcasts every night. I check my watch every time it vibrates.
I love Twist because it provides no easy answers. When the cable initially breaks, Fennell notes the uncertainty in the crowds: “We were like stunned birds. We had flown into the glass. . . . We tried to brush ourselves off. We were all hitting refresh” (52). Repairing the cable is an immense and challenging task: “Conway and his team had to pinpoint the problem, get the ship in place, then figure out a way to lift the cable from the canyon, then mend it and return it to the seafloor” (82). A huge swath of the world is at risk of shutting down if the cable isn’t fixed, but fixing it also allows poison to flow back and forth online.
What can we do in the face of this impossible conundrum? Fennell writes. Zanele performs.
And Conway, well, you’ll have to read the book to find out what Conway does.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2025
Length: 235 pages; audiobook runs 8 hours
Setting: 2019, first in Cape Town, then on the ocean (plus flashbacks)
Timeline: Most of the novel takes place over a few months in early 2019
Narrator: First-person POV of Anthony Fennell, written from some distance in time while he is looking back on the events
Pairs Well With: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker; “Hello” by Adele; songs by Miles Davis
Book Club
Conway grows cynical about his role. He tells Fennell, “[W]e’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another. . . . Everything gets fixed . . . and we all stay broken” (141). How would you respond to Conway? How do you weigh the benefits of technology like social media or AI against its risks?
Zanele perseveres to perform her adaptation of Waiting for Godot against the wishes of Samuel Beckett’s estate: “It was plain to see that Zanele was well aware of the overtones of the ban [against women playing the parts], and it was also obvious that she thought anyone should be allowed to play whatever they wanted. An old argument. Bygone ideas” (23). Representation and authenticity often stir up controversy among artists and audiences. Should an artist be able to depict a character, experience, or history that is not part of their actual identity? Or should the message of a work of art transcend its creator? Who (or what) should get the determining vote?
Close Reading
Intertextuality is a literary lens that seeks out multiple interpretations within any given text. No single reading can be considered “right” because the words and ideas within the text are inevitably, if unconsciously, influenced by the words and ideas of the culture in which it was created. James E. Porter, a teacher and scholar of rhetoric, argues that “[a]ll texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar as we understand its precursors” (34).
When applying that intertextual lens to Twist, it’s impossible to ignore the echoes of The Great Gatsby. Take the opening paragraphs of the two novels:
Both Anthony Fennell and Nick Carraway position themselves as sympathetic narrators for misunderstood men: John Conway and Jay Gatsby. Fennell and Carraway intend to set the record straight. While Conway is described as honest and Gatsby is described as hopeful, both men are depicted as unusually attuned to their historical moment. Gatsby possesses “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Conway seeks to be “honest to the times [and to interpret] the present in light of the past.” The attitude of reverence both narrators express toward their subjects, however flawed both Conway and Gatsby may be, limits the objectivity of their accounts. That’s part of the narrative draw. Both novels are gossipy, in a highly literary way.
But Fennell is much more aware of his own failings than Nick. He’s also older, with an estranged wife and child living an ocean away. Fennell’s world-weariness builds on Nick's youthful obliviousness.
Still don't believe me that these books are in conversation? Check out that last line from Fennell’s introduction to Conway: “The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.” The line is like a direct response to Gatsby himself, who famously tells Nick, “Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
In the end, it doesn’t matter the extent to which Gatsby was on McCann’s mind or not. The Great Gatsby is part of an ongoing cultural conversation that other works respond to and build on, just as future works will respond to and build on Twist.
Creative Writing
Nonfiction: Cables are both literal connectors and also symbols of our relationships. Choose another object from everyday life. The more mundane, the better. Maybe a colander or a watering can or a shingle. First, write about its actual purpose. Then, reflect on what idea or emotion it symbolizes for you.
Fiction: Describing Fennell’s attempt to visualize the underwater chaos snapping the cables, McCann begins with a sentence fragment: “A huge flood, then, beneath the sea, and a break in the cable” (49). Then he follows up with a meandering sentence that takes up an entire page.
The long sentence from my copy of the book. I was sure I’d miss something if I transcribed it!
Choose a sentence from your own draft or from a published piece that you like. Then see how long you can stretch it. Add chronological or spatial details with prepositional phrases (like “beneath the sea”). Expand descriptions with adjective clauses (like “that the cable was carrying at the time”). Create a list based on a single detail (like “who knows what it was that the cable was carrying at the time, all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations, the theories…”). Feel free to get creative with punctuation. Excess is the goal here, not grammatical perfection.
Sentence Study
As McCann demonstrates in his page-long sentence (see above), he’s a fan of layering details and phrases. The following sentence provides an example of layered appositive phrases.
When Fennell arrives in Cape Town, Conway takes him to meet his partner, an actress named Zanele. Fennell reflects on his own ventures into the theatrical realm:
“I had even attempted to write a play about a publisher in Dublin and his wife who love each other so deeply that he is convinced he will follow her, quickly, death on the heels of death, an inevitable murmuring into the sky of his life, a vesper flight, a graceful upward swing into the outer dark.”
An appositive phrase renames another noun. In this case, the noun being renamed is death. Three appositive phrases follow and rename death: “an inevitable murmuring into the sky of life,” “a vesper flight,” and “a graceful upward swing into the outer dark.” As McCann carefully stacks one atop the next, he builds on the core image of flight. The first appositive imagines death as a quiet “murmuring into the sky.” The gesture is quiet and subtle, only hinting at flight with its prepositional phrase: “into the sky.” The second appositive intensifies “sky” into actual “flight.” The final appositive characterizes the nature of this flight as “a graceful upward swing.” Alone, each appositive helps us to understand Fennell’s conception of death, but the way they appear one after the other enhances and clarifies his worldview.
In life we often fail to understand big, abstract concepts like death on the first go. It may take many false starts and lots of meditation before we can clearly articulate our beliefs. We may need to try on different definitions and images the way we try on clothes: Does this fit my lived experience? Could I make this outfit more my own by adding an accessory? McCann demonstrates this manner of thinking on the page. We get to watch as Fennell assesses, re-assesses, and fine tunes his notion of death.
