Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar. I'm filling in for Alison Stewart today who is on vacation. Hey, thanks for spending part of your day with us. I'm so grateful that you are here. Here's what's up on today's show. We'll conclude our Women's History Month series, Equalizers, with Trina Shoemaker, the first woman to win a Grammy for Best Engineered Album.

We'll speak with Atlantic writer Kaitlyn Tiffany about why women love baseball, but baseball doesn't really love them back. We'll hear from author Amor Towles. His best-selling short story collection, Table for Two, is New York Times best selling short story collection, is about to be published in paperback. That's the plan. Let's get this started with a new novel. It's about a crew repairing underwater communications cables.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Kousha Navidar: Author Colum McCann has traveled around the world in his fiction. He's written novels that take place in Czechoslovakia, in Dublin, in Palestine, and right here in New York City. In his latest novel, Colum takes us to a place most humans can't visit, the depths of the ocean. The new book is called Twist. It follows a struggling novelist named Anthony Fennell who accepts an unusual journalistic assignment. He will spend time with the workers tasked with repairing massive underwater cables that connect the world to the . The process of fixing these cables is time-consuming. It's really difficult and potentially dangerous.

In particular, Fennell gets swept up in the life of John Conway, the head of this mission. Conway is a man with a mysterious past, and Fennell finds himself drawn into his orbit. As Conway and Fennell head out to sea, their tenuous relationship begins to fall apart. In a starred review, Kirkus says Twist is "another astounding novel from a fiction master." Tonight at 7:30, Colum McCann is speaking at St. Joseph's University with Phil Klay. First, we are very lucky to have him sitting right across from me in the studio right now. Colum, hey, welcome to All Of It.

Colum McCann: I am so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. I'm almost through the whole book. I really enjoyed what I've read so far. The whole time, I was just wondering, at the start, how did you get interested in these underwater cables first?

Colum McCann: Well, it's amazing to me because I didn't know. I thought that everything that I wrote on my phone and everything I communicated with my computer went somehow up in the air and that the cloud lived in some sort of celestial, heavenly place and then rained a little bit of its darkness down.

Kousha Navidar: [laughs]

Colum McCann: What I didn't know is that 95% of the world's intercontinental information lives in and travels and moves at the bottom of the sea.

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Colum McCann: It's amazing to me because you think of our world and you turn upside down, you have your Mount Everest down there, you have your Grand Canyons, you have your crags, you have your cliff faces, you have everything. It's a cable that's no bigger, in fact, than a garden hose snaking along the floor, carrying your voice, my voice, every listener's voice, every text, every inanity, every beauty, every love note, and $10 trillion worth of financial information every day. What happens when it gets busted? That's a big question.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. What kind of research were you doing? Like, how did you stumble onto that 95% statistic?

Colum McCann: The thing is I had no idea. Most of us have no idea. Satellites are slower, five times slower, five times more expensive.

Kousha Navidar: Than these underwater cables, you're saying?

Colum McCann: That's why underwater cables, they're owned by Google, they're owned by Meta, they're owned by all the big companies, and they're the way that all of our information goes. I went down to South Africa, I got on a boat, only for a couple of days, but what happens is it takes these guys at least six weeks to fix a really deep sea underwater repair.

Now, this is interesting because if you're in Africa, there are two main cables. One goes on the west coast, the other goes on the east coast. If the west coast one goes out, which it did during floods from the Congo. That's where the novel actually takes place, or a lot of it takes place. Then the stuff gets rerouted around to the eastern cable and everything gets slow. If the eastern cable goes out, you are in serious trouble. You could isolate many, many countries in Africa. That has consequences, not only for the people there but all over the world.

Kousha Navidar: The small but mighty garden hose or its siblings that are running around, it's a high-stakes situation. Like one crack, one shift, and you could take out an entire side of one continent.

Colum McCann: You can. If you went to, say, Alexandria, Egypt, and you took out the thing, because that's the access point for cables coming from Asia, from Africa, from Europe. There are certain places, even little landing stations that look like bungalows on the beach. You can actually go on the beach, put your umbrella down, spread out your towel, and about four feet underneath you, the world's Internet will be humming and it'll be going into a landing station where then it gets converted into those ones and zeros and gets pushed on again.

If I sent a message to, say, my folks in Ireland, or my brothers and sisters in Ireland, right now, it goes down to 60 Hudson Street. Then it shoots out to Long Island or New Jersey, goes under the sea, gets caught up in the west coast of Ireland, then shot over to Dublin in 0.0006 of a second.

Kousha Navidar: It's so hard to imagine. You can't really imagine it. The human mind doesn't work at that-

Colum McCann: It doesn't.

Kousha Navidar: -micro-scale, right?

Colum McCann: Because you and I were going right now at billions of pulses per second as light. We become light. How weirdly poetic, biblical--

Kousha Navidar: I was going to say, it's so romantic, kind of.

Colum McCann: It's romantic, but it's also super scary because people could take this out if they wanted to.

Kousha Navidar: Well, it's interesting you bring that up because, lately, these cables have been in the news. I mean, they've become the target of allegedly purposeful damage by Russia, China, the Houthis, wires being cut on purpose. Why are these cables so vulnerable to attack?

Colum McCann: Well, it's amazing. The why is because they carry everything. Information, disinformation is where it all is. I was talking recently with a British admiral in the Navy. He said, "The next war starts underwater, trust me." It's not in drones flying in the air and all the stuff that we've seen recently. It will happen underwater. They will cut cables and they will isolate places and then they can install their own cables in certain ways or their own information channels. They can route it in certain ways. There are grand plans afoot in certain organizations. The Russians know what's going--

Kousha Navidar: It sounds so crazy.

Colum McCann: [laughs] I know. Look, I'm a bit of a Luddite myself. Why am I talking about this stuff? I spent four years studying it, and it's amazing to me that you could go in with, say, six ships and a diving crew of maybe 12, and maybe a land crew of maybe, say, 20 people. I guarantee you that inside a day, you could take down the world's Internet. You could wreak incredible havoc. Now, is that far-fetched? Some people say, "Oh, yes, it's crazy. You can't coordinate all that stuff." It's happening in the Black Sea, it's happening in the Red Sea, and the Russian submarines are scouting all the parts of Europe for what to cut, when to cut. Look, is that a doomsday scenario? Possibly. It seems to be that we're living in some sort of weirdly shattering doomsday scenario.

Kousha Navidar: It's also hard for us. I think not many people are used to converting the ephemeral information flying all around us to this very tactile-

Colum McCann: Exactly.

Kousha Navidar: -easy-to-conceive of, and, I guess, easy to target thing that's all around us under our feet. A big part of the book, obviously, is talking about fixing these cables. It's like the instigator of the whole story. Can you explain for our listeners how they actually find the break in these cables? Because it feels like something out of Melville, like you are just searching and searching.

Colum McCann: It is something out of Melville. In fact, that's actually beautifully put. The cables get cut, say, in a landslide or in an earthquake, and then they get buried. Yes, we can ping, say, a cable between London and Cape Town. You ping down the line and find the general area where the cable has been cut.

Kousha Navidar: Where the break is.

Colum McCann: Yes. Now, you cannot send a diver out into the deep sea because they'll only go 100 meters. You cannot send a robot beyond 2 meters. It'll get crushed. Guess what we do? We send a rope and a grappling hook, which we did also 170 years ago when the first cables went across the Atlantic. We have no other solution than the most primeval or--

Kousha Navidar: Rudimentary.

Colum McCann: Yes, rudimentary, that's a better word, solution. They're looking for a needle in a haystack. These boats, which are full of men, primarily men, occasionally, there's women on these boats, but primarily, it's a crew of about 50 men on a boat about the size of a football field or a couple of blue whales. They go out there and they search for this stuff and they bring us together. Part of this is that we are connected and we're disconnected at the same time. What is this information doing to us? Part of the novel is asking those questions. Is this technology? How do we manage it? What are our spiritual obligations towards one another?

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Both externally and internally, because so much of the story happens with your main character kind of teasing that something has happened. This is a retrospective in a lot of ways. Main character, Fennell, narrated the story. Let's talk about him a little bit. How did he become interested in this idea of repair?

Colum McCann: First of all, it was pandemic. I thought, "Oh, what's our theme? What is our theme? What's our theme going to be the next few years? Healing, yes. Got to be healing." Then I thought, "Well, maybe it's repair." Then I stumbled upon this story about a ship that goes out. I said, "Okay, well, I'm going to follow that. " Then I started thinking, "Oh, maybe I'll put a journalist at sea, but now that's so boring. Why put another journalist?"

Kousha Navidar: You still went with it.

Colum McCann: I still went with it. That's the thing. Because Nabokov says his characters are his galley slaves. He can get them to do whatever he wants them to. I can't. My characters sort of controlled me. I tried to make him into a chaplain. I tried to make him into an engineer.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, interesting.

Colum McCann: I tried to do all these different things. He insisted. I think a part of it was because there's so much information to communicate. He has to come at it from a point of view of somebody who needs to communicate everything that's going on because it's so hard to tell people what goes on in these cables. He became a journalist, and I began to like him again.

Kousha Navidar: Whoa.

Colum McCann: Then he pursues this mysterious character who's out there, who has this background that is never quite fully fulfilled. I don't think it gives too much away to say that it's a novel of repair, but it's also a novel of sabotage.

Kousha Navidar: It is so revealing to understand that the germ of this book for you, the seed, was the pandemic, and the idea-

Colum McCann: That's right.

Kousha Navidar: -of repair. What was it that led you then to what needs repair are these underwater cables? What was that discovery like?

Colum McCann: That discovery was huge for me. I knew nothing about it. I was completely ignorant. I just assumed that all our information flew and operated around us. Then I began to realize, "Oh, this is real stuff. There are people behind this. There are tubes behind this." In fact, the glass tubes within the actual tube are no bigger than your eyelash.

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Colum McCann: This, to me, is also incredible, that light is shooting down these eyelash-sized tubes. I thought, "There's something there that I have to try to get at." Also, we're living in these tough times. We all know it. We see it around us. It seems to me we always lived in tough times, though. Back in the 1950s, my father would have talked about tough times, maybe in 100 years before that. What it seems to me is most interesting is that these tough times are exponential. Everything is shattering around us. We reach down as people, novelists, whatever else it happens to be. We reach down to pick up the shattered pieces. As we reach down to pick up the shattered piece, itself, it shatters in another dozen different pieces. The shattering--

Kousha Navidar: Like a fractal? Like it just keeps shattering?

Colum McCann: Exactly, and quicker and quicker and closer and closer. Why do we feel panicked now? Why do we feel unease? Why do we feel anxious? I think it's because all this stuff is shattering in our fingertips and we don't have time to repair it the way that we want to.

Kousha Navidar: It's faster and it's more in front of you. Yet in many ways, like you're saying, it's 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Colum McCann: Exactly. It's distant. It's so far away from us, and yet it's there at the same time.

Kousha Navidar: It feels in our control, but it's so much out of our control.

Colum McCann: Like the pandemic.

Kousha Navidar: Like the pandemic.

Colum McCann: During the pandemic, we were meaningful and meaningless at the same time. Meaningless because we felt meaningless, but meaningful because every six feet mattered. Remember?

Kousha Navidar: Yes.

Colum McCann: You went down to the grocery store and those six feet, they were incredibly important. We could be tiny and epic at the same time.

Kousha Navidar: What a wonderful place to start with a novel of exploring the self and the world around us.

Colum McCann: Exactly.

Kousha Navidar: This is such a wonderful conversation. We're going to have more of it. I'm speaking with author Colum McCann about his novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. He's also speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University at 7:30. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to dive-- Sorry for the pun, but we're going to dive more into the story and we might start with a little reading selection by you, Colum. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, and we are speaking with author Colum McCann about his new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. Colum's speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University. That's at 7:30 PM, but we're lucky to get to speak with him right now. Not just speak, but also maybe read. Colum, would you be willing to read a bit of the opening pages from the book for us?

Colum McCann: I would love to. Thank you for asking. This is from Twist. In January 2019, I boarded the Georges Lecomte, a cable repair vessel. For a struggling novelist and an occasional playwright, it was a relief to step away from the burden of invention onto a ship that would take me out to the west coast of Africa, a place I'd never been before. The center of the world was slipping. My career felt stagnant, and frankly, at my age, I was unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore.

I thought I would spend a few weeks on the ship, then return to Dublin and write a long-form journalistic piece, shake out the cobwebs. My first two novels had been minor successes and I had written a couple of plays. In recent years, I'd fallen into a clean, plain silence. The days had piled into weeks and the weeks had piled into months. Not much sang to me. No characters, no plot lines. The world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward. As a cure, I had thought that I would try to write a simple love story for the stage, but it turned out to be a soliloquy of solitude, not a love story at all.

I shut the laptop one morning. All my characters slipped into a chasm. I cast around for new ideas, but mostly, it was fall and echo, echo and fall. Everything felt out of season. I was drinking heavily, breaking covenants, refusing my obligations to the page. I bought myself an antique typewriter in an attempt to get back to basics, but the keys stuck and the carriage return broke. So many of my days had been a haze. In my most recent novel, I had been treading memory, the farmhouse, a small red light from the sacred heart.

My father rising early to tend the farm, my mother trapped by shadows on the landing, my rural upbringing, my escape to London, the sunsets over the Thames, the journey home, the descent into suburban Dublin where the street lamps flickered. Some of the novel had been autobiographical, but the fictional elements were truer, all the truth my father told me, but none of the honesty.

I recall him stepping rather apologetically from the Galway Theatre where the book was launched, rain on the cobblestones, exit ghost. I had a feeling that I had exhausted myself and that if I was ever going to write again, I would have to get out into the world. What I needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair.

Kousha Navidar: There's that word, repair, what started the whole novel and this idea for you. That was Colum McCann reading an excerpt from his new novel, Twist. That was the main character, Fennell, writer, journalist, going out to the sea in search of something to write about, repair. Why does he want to take this assignment so very far away from home and out to sea? Do you think he's running from something?

Colum McCann: Yes, he's broken. A lot of us are broken. We've had this epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Maybe not so much for my age. I'm 60 now. Certainly, for the younger generations, you can see this stuff that is going on. Fennell is an illustration of those lonely men in shirt sleeves in T.S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Lonely men in shirt sleeves hanging out of windows. He goes to hear the mermaids singing each to each, and they do not sing to him. In the end, the human voices wake him and he drowns.

There are a lot of literary illusions going on there and what I just said. You know what? He's a man who wants connection, because I think we all want connection, no matter how broken we happen to be. He has a son who is away in South America, who he hasn't seen in many years. He's been drinking him. He says the bottle does a good job of drinking the mind. His mind has been disappearing from-- He's looking for some sort of soul to bring him back to sanity, really. He goes out and finds a broken cable, and the broken cable becomes a metaphor for our broken selves. We can fix it, yes, but can we really fix all the things that are going on? Is technology the thing that is going to allow us to return to our human goodness?

Kousha Navidar: As I'm sitting here listening to you, so many thoughts of my own life are running through my head where it's like we're talking through technology right now, and the whole point of my job that I love is to find that connection. You got to use technology, but it also comes at a cost, and it is so nuanced. In Fennell's case, he's looking for someone, as you said. In many ways, one of those people that he finds is Conway, his subject, who's in charge of these missions to repair cables. Fennell describes Conway as the kind of man who would join a monastery. What sense does this give us of Conway's personality?

Colum McCann: Well, this is the weird thing, that the character who fixes the Internet for us has a flip phone, and he looks like he should be wearing carpenter pants and sandals. He has this era about him that he stepped out of a Leonard Cohen song, like Hallelujah or something. Like he's Jeff Buckley.

Kousha Navidar: He knows the secret chord. [laughs]

Colum McCann: He knows the secret chord. He does know the secret chord. Here's the interesting thing to me. Niels Bohr, the scientist, talked about achieving a truth. At the very opposite end of that truth, the opposing end of that truth is an equal truth that exists at the same time. This character knows technology is bad, yes, but also technology is good.

Our problem is not the phone. Our phone is plastic and sand and silicon and wires and whatever else it happens to be. It's made of things. Our problem is our relationship to the phone and the little squirts of dopamine that come down into our heads from the men behind the curtains. Who are the men behind the curtains? Quite frankly, it's the Elon Musks and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world who are controlling a lot of this.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know that we have to check our own relationship to technology and look at it. If we can understand that our voices are traveling at the bottom of the sea, down to the abyssal zone, into the actual abyss. There's something beautiful about that, too, that there's this notion that there are two opposing truths. Fitzgerald said that the essence of intelligence was the ability to hold--

Kousha Navidar: To hold two equally distinct truths in mind at the same time.

Colum McCann: Exactly. That's our job. I think it's the job of our youngsters nowadays, too. I love the idea of young people getting together, talking to each other, and telling stories, and communicating with compassion. In fact, I have an organization called Narrative 4, which is a global nonprofit that brings together young people to tell stories across the divides. It's really quite beautiful.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Are you using this book as part of that work at all?

Colum McCann: My books, everything is part of that work. For me, it seems to me that our job is now-- Look, the distance between you and me is a story. The distance between you and our listeners, it's only a story. The world is held together with molecules. Yes, of course. Scientists even know that. Really, secretly, it's also held together with stories. We meet one another with these stories. Not like didactic things like I'm blue and you're red, or I'm this and whatever, but personal stories that connect us where we can actually see across the divide and get into a floodplain of understanding. We're not in different channels all the way. We're in a big plane where we can meet one another. Does that sound naive?

Kousha Navidar: It sounds romantic, and it sounds like a good thing to work for. Of course, I've always thought of it as like physically, we are connected by atoms, and spiritually, we're connected by stories, and both are equally important.

Colum McCann: Well, that's a beautiful way to put it.

Kousha Navidar: I just reiterated what you were saying, so I can't take full credit, but yes.

Colum McCann: No, no, no.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're talking to Colum McCann, the author in his new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. Colum is speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University at 7:30 PM. I'm looking at the clock. We got time for just a couple more questions. There is one text that I want to point out that I think you'll get a kick out of. The text says, "Does he read the audiobook? I want to listen to that. Will he be reading the audiobook?"

Colum McCann: I do.

Kousha Navidar: You do?

Colum McCann: Yes. The audiobook came out yesterday, so I'm very happy to do that.

Kousha Navidar: That's wonderful. Listeners, if you're enjoying the conversation right now and you want to discover the story audibly, I mean, there you go. It's a wonderful voice to connect with it. I also want to talk a little bit about the sea in general. The sea seems like such a rich place to do stories for you, as we're wrapping up here. Why do you think that is? Why is the sea such a fertile place for these stories?

Colum McCann: Well, it's so mysterious. We go out to sea. The minute we go out to sea, we're always looking home. So many of us want to go out to sea. Personally, I'm an explorer when I do stories, and I want to go out and I want to find some sort of Galapagos of the imagination, and I want to go, go, go. We're always looking for land. We can't entirely exist at sea. That's what's beautiful about it. We go out and we embrace the mystery out there because we want to come home.

Kousha Navidar: That's so interesting. You see the same thing in music, actually. You always start on the tonic and then you go out somewhere like the minor, where things are a little bit unclear, and then you come back, just like the lunar cycle or that. It's very human but natural, I think, right?

Colum McCann: Exactly. I love this notion of-- Also, the sea is violent and dangerous. Look, stories are dangerous and violent too. When I talk about all of us coming together and the violins come out, let me be entirely clear that stories can take your house away. Stories can take your country away. Stories can take your identity away. These things in the wrong hands can be dangerous. In the right hands, they can work absolute miracles.

Kousha Navidar: We've been talking to Colum McCann. He's the author of the new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. He is speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University at 7:30 PM. Colum, we could keep talking for hours, and I really wish we could.

Colum McCann: I wish.

Kousha Navidar: We got to call it there, though. Thank you so much for your work and thank you for hanging out with us.

Colum McCann: Thank you so much. I appreciate it greatly.