Twist by Colum McCann

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by ‎ Random House on March 25, 2025

My favorite writers are disproportionately Irish. Colum McCann is high on that list. His prose blends power and lyricism. His books capture larger truths than the small stories he tells.

The character who narrates Twist is a writer. Anthony Fennell tells the reader that after writing two novels he deems “minor successes,” he fell into “a clean, plain silence.” Fennell has become dissatisfied with his life in Dublin. “So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires.”

Feeling the need to get away, Fennell accepts an assignment to write an article about broken undersea cables. To that end, his editor arranges for him to accompany the crew of a cable repair ship. He travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, who leads cable repair missions. Members of Conway’s repair crew tell him that Conway’s biography has unexplained gaps. Intrigued, Fennell wants to learn more about Conway, but Conway is reticent when asked about his past. Fennell uses a phrase from Leonard Cohen to describe him: “Conway had that secret chord — the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.”

While waiting for a cable to break, Fennell meets Conway’s beautiful partner Zanele, a South African woman who escaped the slums and was educated in the United States. Fennell regards Conway and Zanele as “the South Africa I had wanted to see, a couple crossing the lines, Black and white, the proof of the times, the ancient conventions dissolving.” Before the ship leaves harbor, Zanele departs for London, where she has a part in Waiting for Godot (much to the chagrin of Beckett’s estate, which is enforcing Beckett’s insistence that “the roles in the play were specifically not for women”). Fennell has the sense that something in Conway’s relationship with Zanele is broken but Conway will not speak to Fennell about his personal life until they have been at sea for weeks, when he finally loses patience with Conway's inquisitive nature.

Fennell’s interior voice also frets about his inability to establish a relationship with his “sloe-eyed son.” Fennell hasn’t seen his son, who now lives in Santiago, for five years. For reasons he can’t explain, Fennell denies that he has any children when Zanele asks him about his family. Conway fears that his son feels abandoned, although “his mother had been the one to actually leave, but it certainly felt that I had propelled her.”

Most of the story consists of Fennell’s observation of Conway and speculation about Zanele, mixed with fascinating descriptions of men at work. In addition to learning how undersea cables are repaired, Fennell ponders the international dependence on cables for news and all manner of information, “all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations” — the list of things that travel under the sea continues for most of a page. Fennell develops a sense of wonder about cables and their traffic that a reader might find infectious.

After the groundwork has been laid, Twist takes a twist. All I will say is that Conway disappears, unexpectedly and without warning. Fennell foreshadows an eventful change in Conway’s life when, early in the novel, he explains that he is telling what he knows of Conway’s story to counter the impressions left by “the websites and platforms and rumor mills” that “will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts.” Fennell wants to set the record straight, although he can only speculate about Conway’s motivation for actions that earned him a degree of notoriety.

The primary theme of Twist is repair. The story sends its protagonist on a ship that repairs undersea cables, but the journey gives Fennell an opportunity to repair his life. But who is he kidding, he asks himself. “The idea of an actual repair was the sort of soul-destroying bullshit that I needed to strenuously avoid.” At sea, free from the alcohol that usually protects him from the pain of clear thought, Fennell has a chance to consider repairing his own life. What steps he will take, if any, are left for the closing pages.

Conway has a different take on repair. He has come to view repairs as temporary, perhaps pointless. He fixes one cable and another breaks. What good comes from repairing them? He doesn’t feel responsible for the evil that the internet enables, yet he acknowledges that “we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another.”

Conway questions the value of repair when he learns that Zanele has been attacked but is on the mend in England. “Everything gets fixed,” he says, “and we all stay broken.” As Fennell describes Conway’s relationship with Zanele: “They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”

The novel’s secondary theme is turbulence. Heisenberg tried “to mathematically determine the precise transition of a smoothly flowing liquid into a turbulent flow” without much success. The turbulence of life is no more easily explained. “Down below, the turbulence gathered. The Congo had unrecognized depths. All the things we didn’t know. All the things we were doing to ourselves. The manner in which we broke one another.” Conway’s turbulent relationship with Zanele may have been his undoing, the one thing Conway lacked the skill to repair.

Much like Moby-Dick, to which McCann pays tribute, Twist is built upon an ode to the sea. Life originated in hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean, but when Fennell comments upon our evolutionary ancestors crawling out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, he does so with humility. The sea is our birthplace yet we understand little of its depths. Zanele laments its use as a dumping ground — more destruction that we may never be able to repair.

Apart from its full characters and thought-provoking story, Twist earns my admiration for McCann’s ability to craft honest sentences with the sharpness of daggers. A few of my favorites:

“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”

“Just because the truth is ignored,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be.”

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”

“The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while.”

“Few of the stories we have inside ourselves ever get properly spoken.”

I can spend all day reading McCann and never feel that I’ve wasted a moment. Twist is a strong addition to his oeuvre.

RECOMMENDED

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Published in Japan in 2023; published in translation by Hogarth on March 18, 2025

One gift that authors give readers is the opportunity to exercise empathy. By reading about lives that are not their own, readers gain an understanding of people that extends beyond the knowledge they gain from personal contacts. Reading the first-person narrator’s account of her life in Hunchback opens a window on the life that a Japanese woman might live when she is physically impaired by a severe disability.

Shaka Izawa (like the author) suffers from myotubular myopathy, a rare genetic disorder that causes severe muscle weakness. The condition has affected the curvature of her spine, leaving it “twisted so as to crush my right lung.” As the novel’s title suggests, her body has taken the form of a hunchback. “As a consequence, my way of walking was sufficiently imbalanced to make the word ‘limp’ seem an understatement, and whenever I lost focus, I’d strike my head on the left-hand side of the door frame.

Shaka had a tracheostomy to ease her breathing. She needs the assistance of a ventilator to breathe when she lies on her back. She uses a suction catheter to drain mucus from her windpipe. She needs to cover the hole in her throat to speak, but she doesn’t do so often because speaking increases her mucus production.

Shaka is fortunate to have been born to financially secure parents who assured that she would receive the lifelong care she needs. Shaka owns a building that her parents converted into a group home. She has lived there for since her early teens. Caregivers prepare her meals and help her bathe, as they do for the other disabled residents.

For nearly thirty years, Shaka has not set foot outside the building where she lives. She never has visitors, apart from healthcare professionals and the people who service her ventilator. Saou Ichikawa makes the point that Japanese culture relegates the disabled to the status of nonpersons. Japan, she tells the reader, “works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society.” Keeping the disabled out of sight spares the abled members of society the discomfort of recognizing that some people do not share abilities that they take for granted. The American push for inclusion of the disabled (which will likely be set back by deliberate misunderstandings of what DEI means) has evidently not taken root in Japan.

To help pass the time, Shaka takes remote classes at a university. She’s working on her second degree. She also writes porn. She donates her earnings from porn production to food banks, shelters for homeless girls, and charities for orphans.

Shaka’s focus on sexual pleasure in her part-time work provides another opportunity for Ichikawa to contrast the lives of “normal” people in Japan with the lives of the disabled. Sexual desire is normal, no less so for the disabled, but Japanese society isn’t prepared to accept the notion of a severely disabled individual having a sexual encounter. Hunchback may be an attempt to provoke change in society’s willingness to accept that disabled individuals may be just as interested in sex as the nondisabled.

The novel opens with one of Shaka’s porn stories, an account of a woman visiting a sex club. Her date and another couple adjourn to a private room where they engage in sex acts while patrons on the other side of the glass walls masturbate. We later learn that on the site for which she writes, the greatest demand “among male users is first-hand accounts of various adult entertainment venues or lists of top-twenty pickup spots, together with adverts for dating and hook-up apps, while among women, it’s lists of the top-twenty shrines to pray at for rekindling romance, together with adverts for psychic hotlines.”

Shaka is a virgin, but her “ultimate dream” is to get pregnant and have an abortion. The shape of her skeleton would prevent her from giving birth, but she has the biological ability to conceive an embryo. She sees pregnancy and abortion as a means of living “like a normal woman.”

Shaka tweets her thoughts and fantasies (including working as a high-end prostitute) with the assumption that nobody reads them. She’s surprised to learn that one of her male caretakers has, in fact, followed them. For a price, he seems willing to make her fantasy come true. At the same time, his distaste for Shaka is evident. Shaka realizes that the “appropriate distance between us was one that allowed him to pity me.” Their abbreviated sexual encounter leaves the reader wondering which of them was more affected by the experience.

The novel is filled with insights into the life experiences of a severely disabled woman. The discussion of abortion is particularly telling. Shaka tells the reader that Japanese women routinely abort fetuses to avoid giving birth to a disabled child. Shaka’s fetus could be genetically unimpaired, so she sees an intentional pregnancy for the purpose of having an abortion as an attempt to “balance the scales.”

The story ends by transitioning back to the world of porn, this time featuring Shaka playing out her fantasy life as a prostitute. Yet this time Shaka is not the porn’s creator but a character imagined by the creator, a character who writes porn as “a way for her to survive in society.” The narrator considers that “maybe I myself don’t exist,” circling back to the earlier theme of disabled people living invisible lives, hidden from a society that prefers not to be disturbed by knowledge that some lives are less fortunate than their own.

Hunchback is a powerful and sometimes disturbing work. Readers who are willing to move outside their comfort zones to consider experiences that they cannot easily imagine will find ample opportunities to exercise their compassion in Saou Ichikawa’s semi-autobiographical novel.

RECOMMENDED

Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Published by ‎ Tor Books on February 18, 2025

Marty Hench, a character I love from Cory Doctorow’s first two novels in this series, tells his coming-of-age story in Picks and Shovels. It is both the story of a young man finding his purpose and the story of a political awakening. And it’s a story of people he met along the way who came to terms with their identities and beliefs — and those who never overcame their innate greed. While the first two books in the series are mysteries solved by a forensic accountant, this one explains how Hench solved the mystery of himself.

Marty’s father was an engineer. He sent Marty to MIT to earn an engineering degree, but Marty was unenthusiastic about his studies. He proved to be more enthused about the emergence of personal computers. He taught himself to program and fell in with a group of students who loved computers as much as he did. Marty was dumpster diving for computer paper (the kind that comes with perforated edges and holes that line up with the printer’s sprockets) when he met Arthur Hellman, an even more committed computer geek who was dumpster diving for anything he could find.

Marty and Art become roommates. To appease his father after dropping out of MIT, Marty gets an associate’s degree in accounting. Marty and Art eventually move to San Francisco, where Silicon Valley is becoming the hotspot for tech innovation, in large part because California law does not allow noncompete agreements to stifle competition. A good many people in the business world extoll the virtues of competition until they have to deal with it.

Marty starts doing freelance accounting work. He contracts with a company called Fidelity Computing, a gig that lets him merge his interest in computers with his knowledge of spreadsheets. Fidelity was founded by a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop (no, they don’t walk into a bar together). Fidelity’s scam is to sell computer systems to religious schools and businesses. The systems have been designed so that only products (such as floppy disks and printers) purchased from Fidelity are compatible. They’re also designed to fail (the printers jam frequently), forcing customers to turn to Fidelity for expensive repairs.

Three women who worked for Fidelity in tech positions left to start their own company. They reverse engineered Fidelity products to create floppy disks and printers that will work with Fidelity systems. Fidelity is out to get the three women. The company hires Marty to help them. When the women persuade Marty that the company is a scam, Marty breaks his contract with Fidelity and makes a new one with the women.

The story follows the conflicts between the women and Fidelity. Some of the conflicts are violent, as the gangsters who financed Fidelity’s startup don’t take kindly to the lost profits that the women are causing. Marty isn’t much of a fighter, but a badass woman named Pat isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with thugs. She also teaches Marty to be a capable lover. The conflicts keep the story moving and provide a satisfying amount of action.

Marty learns other lessons in his young life. On his way to San Francisco, he meets and shags a woman named Lucille who teaches him how to get outside of his own head and listen — truly listen, even to the silences between words — when he has a conversation. Art comes out as a gay man and teaches Marty the pain of not being allowed to live the life that defines you. One of the three women who compete against Fidelity is a lesbian who teaches him a similar lesson when her religious family disowns her. She’s one of several characters who teach him about the hypocrisy practiced by certain religious folk. A few women teach him that fundamental feminist values — the importance of treating women as the equals of men — are really human values. People with money teach him that people who lust for money often place their acquisition of wealth above moral action.

The lessons are valuable, although they are repeated so frequently that the novel sometimes feels like Doctorow is hammering home the things he wants his readers to learn. Readers who think it’s bad to be “woke” — and a disappointing number of science fiction fans feel that way, despite sf’s reputation for encouraging free thinking — might dislike the novel’s emphasis on the value of tolerance, compassion, and decency. Open-minded readers, on the other hand, should appreciate it.

The plot is interesting. Doctorow avoids an artificially happy ending. He makes it easy to sympathize with the women who give the story its heart. The novel’s atmosphere, rooted in San Francisco during the earliest days of the tech boom, will probably evoke nostalgia in readers who are old enough to remember when early versions of personal computers were just arriving on the market. I’m not as high on Picks and Shovels as I was on the first two novels — the preachiness got to me after a bit, even if Doctorow was preaching to the choir — but I nevertheless enjoyed it.

RECOMMENDED

Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

Published by ‎ Soho Crime on February 4, 2025

Saint of the Narrows Street is a story of people who are searching for identities to replace their lost lives. What happens to people who lose their dreams, or who never have dreams to chase? Near the novel’s end, Fab ponders that question when he walks into a seedy bar: “The joint’s a real den for degenerate drunks. All he can think is they were once little kids. Stood in schoolyards and mouthed the Pledge of Allegiance. Ate their sack lunches. Said their prayers.”

Fab is only eight months old when the story begins. Risa, his 28-year-old mother, has already made a life-defining mistake by dropping out of Staten Island College and marrying Sav Franzone. Sav thinks Risa is boring. In an abstract way, he’s proud that she gave birth to his son, but he’s already itching to split. Sav is out most nights, drinking and cheating on Risa with Sandra Carbonari.

One night Sav comes home drunk with a gun and a plan to travel to Florida with Sandra. He waves the gun around, points it at Risa and Sav, packs a bag, and gets into a fight with Risa’s sister Giulia. As he’s choking Giulia, Risa hits him with a cast iron pan. Sav hits his head on the corner of a table as he falls. Risa calls Sav’s childhood friend, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, who comes over in time to watch Sav die. They haul the body away and bury it on rural land that belongs to Chooch’s mother.

The story follows the main characters as they live troubled lives for the next eighteen years. Risa lives with her guilt by telling herself that Sav would have killed her or her son if she hadn’t killed him. Chooch lives with his unrequited love for Risa and his feeling that, unlike his father, who “had an identity as a New Yorker and as an Italian American,” he has nothing but the property he inherited from his parents. Giulia lives a life of dissatisfaction, broken only by a drunken yet memorable sexual encounter with a woman.

Collateral characters contribute to the theme of broken lives that end in violence. Sav’s brother Roberto returns a few years after stealing money from a vengeful man and running away with his wife. A drunken priest with a gambling addiction tries to blackmail Risa with his half-formed hunches about her role in Sav’s disappearance. When he’s ten, a young troublemaking friend of Fab goads him into “living on the edge” until the friend pays a price. Optimistic people believe it's never too late to start over, but some people are perpetually “pinned forever to the void of this moment, the terror of regret.”

Saint of the Narrows Street gives the impression that some people were born to lose. Sav and Fab, Roberto and the gambling priest, fit that profile. Other people might be able to live fulfilling lives but, for reasons of their own, go in the wrong direction. Risa, Giulia, and Chooch never took the risk of looking for a better life. By the novel’s end, they’re in their forties and wondering what’s left.

The story culminates with Fab’s search for his absent father. Conversations with Sandra and other people who knew Sav offer clues about his father’s fate. Tension mounts as Risa realizes she can no longer hide the truth about her father’s death from Fab. But how will he react to the truth? Will all the central characters come to a violent end?

The story is bleak, but only because it takes an honest, unflinching look at certain kinds of lives — the lives of people who are stuck, who have abandoned hope or never had any. Poignant takes on characters (Risa thinks her father’s “version of God seems to have nothing to do with love and everything to do with shutting the door”) sharpen their personalities. Sharp prose and full characterizations contribute to one of the strongest novels I expect to read this year.

RECOMMENDED

To Save the Man by John Sayles

Published by Melville House on January 21, 2025

The story told in To Save the Man culminates (more or less) with the Wounded Knee Massacre, yet the massacre itself occupies only a few pages. Readers who want to learn more about the tragic event (and even those who don’t) would benefit from reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

To Save the Man's focus is on a school for Native American children who were sent by their families (under durress) to learn English and the white man’s ways. Jacques LaMere sends his son Antoine because the government will not recognize Jacques, whose father was a French Canadian, as an enrolled member of the Ojibwe unless his child is in an Indian school.

Indian schools were part of the disastrous federal policy of assimilating Indians — meaning, making them more like white people — or killing them. After Antoine takes a train to Pennsylvania, the story follows Antoine’s adaptation to life at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school is run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, whose motto is: “To save the man, we must kill the Indian.” Students were not allowed to speak their own language, pray to their own god, or follow their own customs, lest they not learn to be white. After all, white people are civilized and Indians aren’t — just ask the white people.

Most Indians have been herded onto reservations, but the government’s latest plan is to take the reservation land, divide it into allotments, and deed an allotment to enrolled tribal members. The expectation, of course, is that Indians can be manipulated into selling their land to white people for less than it is worth (which isn’t much), making this yet another scheme to benefit white people at the expense of their nonwhite victims. No doubt the robber barons who ran the country at the time thought they were making America great again.

The novel’s background is familiar, but it is always worth remembering how tragically out nation has treated nonwhite people, Native Americans first among them. Unfortunately, the story adds little to the background. We meet a Paiute known as the Messiah, who has had a vision of a “great upheaval” that will restore the buffalo and swallow the white men, thus returning the Earth to “how it was before the whites came.” At the Creator’s direction, the Messiah teaches people a “ghost dance” that will hasten the upheaval. We also spend a few pages in the vicinity of Sitting Bull, just before he is killed by the police.

We meet other students, including Herbert Sweetcorn, Jesse Echohawk, Clarence Regal, and a young man known as Trouble. Some students are quick to learn but feel conflicted about the use they should make of their knowledge. Some students have adventures of their own, including fleeing from the school and riding on freight trains until they get caught. Some students have visions of romance. Miss Redbird, a teacher at the school, feels like a traitor for speaking to children in English who can’t understand her.

The story flits from character to character, never spending enough time with any of them to permit full development. The novel feels like a collection of characters in search of a meaty story. Each has a small story that illustrates the American government’s crappy treatment of Indians, but the stories fail to add up to anything larger.

The ghost dances eventually spook white soldiers into slaughtering hundreds of Indians at Wounded Knee. Perhaps John Sayles wanted to avoid glorifying the massacre, but in doing so, he deprived the scene of its inherent drama. Much the same can be said of the rest of the story. It’s interesting but lacks the forceful telling that such a horrifying time in American history deserves. Fiction can reveal new truths about history, but To Save the Man reveals little that most people who pay attention to history don’t already know. The novel nevertheless has value as a reminder of white America’s past that many would prefer to bury.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS