Review by Kevin Brown
Anthony Fennell, the narrator of Twist, should remind the reader of Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. He’s lost his way in life, unable to write a new novel or play, even unwilling to admit the existence of the son he’s become estranged from since he and his wife went separate ways. He receives an opportunity to write a story about people who work on breaks in underwater cables — which actually carry most of the data from one country to another, a fact most people don’t know — which leads him to meet John Conway.
Like Carraway’s Gatsby, Conway is a mysterious figure who seems to have made himself into somebody else, perhaps for the love of a woman who seems beyond his station in life. Zanele is a South African actress whom Conway lives with when he’s not on the boat repairing cables. Throughout the novel, she becomes more famous while Conway and Fennell are on the ocean, Conway to repair a significant break, Fennell to write about Conway and his crew.
The imagery of breaks in communication runs throughout the novel, as Fennell never understands Conway, and Conway and Zanele seem unable to communicate about what matters in their relationship. However, since the reader only sees that relationship through Fennell’s lens, it’s unclear if that is the case or if there is some other reason for the breakdown in their relationship.
McCann also explores the idea of repair, what one can and can’t mend, in a world that has become more and more digitally connected, but more and more emotionally fractured. Conway seems to reinvent himself, but Fennell also needs to mend himself in some important ways. Twist asks the reader to consider who they are and how they present that self to the world, but also if repair is possible in a world that seems so broken.
Twist by Colum McCann. Random House, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
