“Twist”: Colum McCann’s Bold, Braided Story of Art, Justice, and the Fragile Lines Between Performance and Power

Dancing on the Edge of History: The Rhythmic Intensity of Twist

It begins with a body in motion—an exhale, a blur, a beat dropped on concrete. From there, Twist unspools like a breakdance routine captured in prose: precise, poetic, erratic, and deeply choreographed. Colum McCann has never been afraid to fracture linearity or blur genre, and in this new novel, he doubles down on that instinct, creating a book that pulses with urgency, rage, and grace.

Set in the aftermath of Apeirogon, this novel extends McCann’s collaborative spirit—once again folding real-life figures and events into a fictional frame. But here, the focus is tighter, street-level, more defiant. Twist is a tribute to the human body not just as vessel, but as protest. It follows a group of dancers—specifically b-boys—whose performances become more than self-expression. They’re acts of resistance, memorials, grief rituals, declarations of survival.

The novel’s structure is unconventional, told in fragments and looping repetitions that mirror both the improvisational nature of breakdance and the recursive patterns of trauma. There is no straightforward timeline, no clean arc—only echoes, reversals, ruptures. You don’t read this book so much as fall into its rhythm. And in that rhythm, McCann gives us one of his most emotionally raw works. “To twist is to remember differently,” one character observes. “It’s the only way my body knows how to hold what my mouth can’t say.” That line becomes a kind of thesis for the book—a justification for its form, and a plea for the reader’s attention.

Stylistically, the writing leaps between documentary detail and lyrical bursts. There are paragraphs that feel like movement transcribed—sharp, staccato, restless—and others that slow down into near-meditative stillness. McCann’s language doesn’t just describe; it performs. And through that performance, themes of injustice, displacement, masculinity, and legacy emerge—not as lectures, but as lived weight. The world here is brutal, beautiful, and always watching.

There’s also an electric tension between silence and sound. Between what’s spoken and what’s danced. Between what’s been lost and what the body refuses to forget. By the end, when the past and present collapse into one final spin, you’re not just reading anymore—you’re bearing witness.

Who Should Read This

Twist is for readers who want fiction that doesn’t sit still—who find joy in the risk of nonlinear storytelling and depth in hybrid forms. If you’re drawn to books that blend journalism, poetry, and protest, this one will speak to you. It belongs beside work by Teju Cole, Claudia Rankine, and Ocean Vuong—authors who also insist that form is as political as content. Ideal for lovers of literature that moves like music and bruises like truth, Twist demands your full attention and rewards it with fierce, unflinching beauty.