Twist: A Novel

At the end of Herman Melville’s novella, “Bartleby the Scrivener” we learn that Bartleby’s “pallid hopelessness” may have been caused by his stint in the Washington, D.C., Dead Letter Office where he sorted through undelivered mail—“pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.” Almost the last prose Melville ever published, “Bartleby” turns on the notion of our unreachable separateness.

In his new novel, Twist, Colum McCann has given us an updated portrait of that loneliness for the digital age. Perversely, the novel has little to do with computers or social media—not for McCann the trickery of writing in emojis or DMs. His novel deals with the mechanics of digital communication, more physical than cyber.

Anthony Fennell is a writer who has withdrawn from most of his life. Divorced from his wife and distant from his child, he no longer has any zest for writing. His previous novels and plays sound like rumors from a different life. Overweight, alcoholic and apathetic, he decides a serious nonfiction assignment will take him out of his funk, or at least out of his day-to-day existence.

He signs up to write an article on the cables that carry internet traffic around the world. McCann calls our attention to the fact that the bulk of international communication is not wafting down in the airy waves from satellites, but travels in physical, earthbound wires spread across the rocks and mud on ocean floors—cables that quite literally connect the continents.

Fennell travels to Johannesburg, South Africa to write about John Conway, the chief of a team of engineers who seek out and repair breaks in those cables—those caused by fishing trawlers, accidents, or sudden shifts in the underwater terrain. When a landslide occurs in the depths off the coast of the Congo River Delta, Fennell signs up to spend weeks with Conway and his crew finding and repairing the breach.

Fennell’s attempts to come to grips with life on board the repair boat George LeCointe slowly help him address his own life. The crew is made up of men from all over the world, all highly esteemed professionals dedicated to repairing the break as quickly as possible and getting back to life and family.

However, Fennell becomes particularly fascinated with Conway, in no small part because Conway is a dedicated professional who seems to understand he has little life to get back to. His partner, Zanelle, a beautiful South African actress, has moved to London to star in a revival of Waiting for Godot, When a crisis makes her the center of viral internet attention, she becomes a genuine celebrity and Conway’s isolation begins to look permanent, underlining Fennell’s inability to see a way out of his own loneliness.

McCann beautifully captures Fennell’s alienation and his slow return toward human contact. That return is sent into high definition by Conway’s disappearance after a spate of vandalism attacks undo some of the repairs that Conway and his team have managed. Why one man would choose connection and life while another wallows in isolation and death is the mystery McCann is contemplating.

The gritty, dangerous mixture of calculation and guess work that goes into finding these cables, lifting them from the sea and reweaving their broken strands of light is carefully documented even as it is all rendered poetry. The poetic power of the internet—human connection travelling through strands of light—is rendered through a close examination of its material makeup.

McCann soaks the prose with literary and cultural references. In addition to Melville and Beckett, careful readers will find shadows of Whitman, Conrad, and Wilde as well as direct paeans to Francis Ford Coppola and Van Morrison. McCann himself even makes a brief cameo late in the novel.

There is a certain void at the heart of all this because the cause of Fennell’s obsessive interest in Conway is never really clear. He admires the man’s skill and is openly jealous of his love for Zanelle. However, while Conway will strike some readers as a stand in for Captain Ahab—capable of inspiring compulsive attention—many will instead find Godot—an absence, more interesting in his disappearance than his presence.