the passenger book review cormac mccarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s New Novel: Two Lives, Two Ways of Seeing

In “The Passenger,” a pair of siblings contend with the world’s enigmas and their own demons.

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• Oct. 19, 2022
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THE PASSENGER, by Cormac McCarthy

The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan . You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way.

The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, “The Passenger” — alongside its twisted sister, “Stella Maris,” which comes out later this year — kept making me think about the word “portentous.” Not finding this word identified as a Janus anywhere, I hereby nominate it for candidacy. “Portentous,” according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, “eliciting amazement” and “being a grave or serious matter.” But it can also mean “self-consciously solemn” and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence. There is bravery involved, especially at heights of style where the difference can be between greatness and straight badness. He teeters more in these new books than in the several novels for which he is judged a great American writer.

The first paragraph of “ The Passenger ” works as a microcosm of the problem. It paints a barren scene, a snowy field in which a young woman has hanged herself: “It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones.” Before you’ve even settled in, McCarthy has thrown “and” at you four times, a word that both splits and fuses. You hear Hemingway and the curious loudness of those supposedly clipped and stripped-down sentences. Something attention-seeking in the syntax. I read this novel when I was recovering from the infantilizing misery of a 15-millimeter kidney stone, and my 11-year-old daughter read parts of it to me because the pain pills made me want to barf when I tried to read, and at one point she put down the book and said, “Why does he say AND so much!”

Still, it was a thrill to hear new McCarthy sentences read aloud. The teetering wouldn’t be interesting if he weren’t capable of those spellbinding descriptive passages, a trademark. In the first paragraph he does one of his McCarthy things and makes you look up a chewy old word, “stogged.” The hunter who finds the woman, we are told, knelt and “stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him.” To be stogged is to be stuck in the snow or mud. You can also stog something into the snow, like a stake. The way McCarthy deploys it, you hear what it means even before you know.

But the paragraph descends into the wrong kind of portentous. The hunter “thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing.” (Really? “Have mercy on her soul”? He’d not that?) We read that the woman has tied a red sash around her dress, providing “some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” (What pathetic fallacy is this? Who has scrupled in creating this desolation?) Then we are told that this is happening “on this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.” (Did people, in some far-flung time, used to say “spoken” to mean risen or begun — parallel, perhaps, to “morning is broken”? No. I checked.) As for this Christmas Day, it will turn out that the woman hanging there is Jewish.

Much of “The Passenger” happens in a room, or a couple of rooms, where the same scene, with variations, runs on a loop. I suspect that many readers will resist or resent spending as much time there as we do. I came to find the goings-on sometimes captivating, but almost feel that I am covering for my abuser in confessing that. The young woman, Alicia, lies in bed. She’s schizophrenic, in the last year of her life. Her room is visited by a succession of vaudeville phantoms and spectral sideshow acts. Their spokesman, a kind of impresario, is the Thalidomide Kid, or the Kid for short.

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Book Reviews

Cormac mccarthy's new books seem to try to encapsulate the human experience.

Gabino Iglesias

First Reads: Exclusive excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's forthcoming 'Stella Maris'

After 16 years, author Cormac McCarthy gifts two new novels to readers

In terms of scope, works of literature exist on a spectrum that goes from small narratives packed into a microcosm that want to explore a single element of human nature all the way to stories that seem obsessed with somehow encapsulating the totality of the human experience and decoding the meaning of life.

Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris -- the author's first two books in more than a decade — belong to the latter group, both as standalone novels and when taken together as deeply intertwined works of fiction that take place in the same universe and with the same characters.

The Passenger , set mostly in Louisiana in the early 1980s, tells the story of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western (see what the author of Blood Meridian , All the Pretty Horses , The Crossing , and Cities of the Plain did there?). Bobby, who used to be a Formula 2 racecar driver, works as a salvage diver. He's a moody, hard-drinking man who's haunted by the loss of his beloved sister, who committed suicide a decade earlier, and by the ghost of his father, a renowned physicist who helped J. Robert Oppenheimer develop the atom bomb. Bobby works a dive at an offshore plane crash, but it's not a regular job.

The crash never makes the news, important parts of the plane are missing, and one of the passengers isn't inside the plane with the rest of the bodies. After the dive, strange men start following Bobby around and ask him questions. Also, someone repeatedly breaks into his home, forcing him to move and consider abandoning Louisiana altogether. While dealing with the increasing weirdness of the mysterious crash, the strange men shadowing him, and his growing paranoia, Bobby rereads the letters Alicia left behind. Also, readers get vignettes of Alicia dealing with the "cohorts," a group of imagined beings that harassed her.

The Passenger is part familial trauma story — including incest — and part slow-burning thriller. However, it's also much more than that. McCarthy writes about everything here, from buried gold and incredibly detailed dives to mathematics and the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

"Those who survived would often remember this horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors."

Elegant writing like this is present once in a while, and it's balanced by straightforward prose about everything and nothing: people driving, talking, drinking coffee or beer, meditations on death, observations about nature, staring out the window, or feeding the cat. The back and forth — this is a novel about nothing important/this is a novel about everything that matters — is often surprising, perhaps a bit disjointed and jarring, but it's also unequivocally McCarthy-ish, and it works. The novelist is concerned with the big questions now more than even, and that obsession is present in almost every page.

And then there's Stella Maris.

Consisting purely of dialogue — devoid of the punctuation and dialogue tags commonly used for it, as McCarthy has always done — Stella Maris records Alicia's long, bizarre conversations with a male psychiatrist at the titular mental institution in 1972. While there, Alicia is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but she is brilliant — perhaps a genius — and the conversations go from discussing the Thalidomide Kid, an imagined balding dwarf with flippers for hands who constantly visited Alicia, to the difference between reality and human consciousness. Stranger and smarter than The Passenger , Stella Maris is also somehow darker and packed with lines like "The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy" and "I think your experience of the world is largely a shoring up against the unpleasant truth that the world doesnt know you're here."

The Passenger flirts with not being a traditional novel and succeeds. Stella Maris doesn't care about not being a novel, and it shines because of it. The former is dark and mysterious like a night out on the bayou. The latter — a spiritual sister presented as a coda to be published a month later — is wild, profoundly sinister, and more a philosophical exploration and celebration of math-mysticism and the possibilities — and perhaps unknowability? — of quantum mechanics than a novel. Taken together, these two novels are a floating signifier that refuses to be pinned down. They are also great additions to McCarthy's already outstanding oeuvre and proof that the mind of one of our greatest living writers is as sharp as it has ever been.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias .

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New York Times Bestseller

THE PASSENGER

by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2022

Enigmatic, elegant, extraordinary: a welcome return after a too-long absence.

A beguiling, surpassingly strange novel by the renowned—and decidedly idiosyncratic—author of Blood Meridian (1982) and The Road (2006).

“He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead.” He is Bobby Western, as described by college friend and counterfeiter John Sheddan. Western doesn’t much like the murky depths, but he’s taken a job as a salvage diver in the waters around New Orleans, where all kinds of strange things lie below the surface—including, at the beginning of McCarthy’s looping saga, an airplane complete with nine bloated bodies: “The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation.” Ah, but there were supposed to be 10 aboard, and now mysterious agents are after Western, sure that he spirited away the 10th—or, failing that, some undisclosed treasure within the aircraft. Bobby is a mathematical genius, though less so than his sister, whom readers will learn more about in the companion novel, Stella Maris . Alicia, in the last year of her life, is in a distant asylum, while Western is evading those agents and pondering not just mathematical conundrums, but also a tortured personal history as the child of an atomic scientist who worked at Oak Ridge to build the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s all vintage McCarthy, if less bloody than much of his work: Having logged time among scientists as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, he’s now more interested in darting quarks than exploding heads. Still, plenty of his trademark themes and techniques are in evidence, from conspiracy theories (Robert Kennedy had JFK killed?) and shocking behavior (incest being just one category) to flights of beautiful language, as with Bobby's closing valediction: “He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.”

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-307-26899-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Colleen Hoover

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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The Incandescent Wisdom of Cormac McCarthy

His two final novels are the pinnacle of a controversial career.

T he Passenger and Stella Maris , Cormac McCarthy’s new novels, are his first in many years in which no horses are harmed and no humans scalped, shot, eaten, or brained with farm equipment. But you would be wrong to assume that the world depicted in these paired works of fiction, published a month and a half apart, is a cheerier place. “There are mornings when I wake and see a grayness to the world I think was not in evidence before,” The Passenger ’s most jovial character, John Sheddan, says to one of several other characters who are suicidally depressed. “The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.”

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McCarthy throws the reader an anchor of this sort every few pages, the kind of burdensome existential pronouncement that might weigh a lesser book down and make one long for the good old-fashioned Western equicide of McCarthy’s earlier work. At least when a horse dies, it doesn’t spend a week beforehand in the French Quarter musing about existence. For that matter, neither do most of McCarthy’s previous human victims, who were too busy getting hacked or shot to death to see the darkness coming and philosophize about their condition. To twist a line from the poet Vachel Lindsay: They were lucky not because they died, but because they died so dreamlessly.

McCarthy’s fervent admirers are bound to come to these novels with impossible expectations. The late critic Harold Bloom, who spoke for superfans of the writer everywhere, wrote that “no other living American novelist … has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian ,” McCarthy’s relentlessly bloody 1985 Western. That verdict came down back when Bloom favorites Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo still dominated the literary scene. McCarthy haters, equally passionate, find his writing mannered, his characters tediously masculine, and his plots—well, not really plots at all so much as excuses to find ever-fancier ways to rhapsodize about murder and carnage and the sublime landscape of the frontera.

The weirdness of McCarthy’s style is hard to overstate. He abjures quotation marks and most commas and apostrophes, so even his text looks denuded and desertlike, with the remaining punctuation sprouting intermittently, like creosote bushes. (I once compared an uncorrected proof of Blood Meridian with the finished book. I found that he’d struck just a couple of commas from the final text. That amused me: Looks good , McCarthy must have decided. But still too much punctuation. ) His language is archaic. Characters speak untranslated Spanish and, in The Passenger , a bit of German. The omniscient narrator makes no concession to readers unfamiliar with 19th-century saddlery, obscure geological terminology, and desert botany.

The narration therefore registers as omniscient in both a literary and theological sense—a voice of a merciless God, speaking in tones and language meant for his own purposes and not for ours. He presides over the incessantly violent Blood Meridian and the only intermittently violent Border Trilogy of the 1990s ( All the Pretty Horses , The Crossing , Cities of the Plain ), and he delivers truths and edicts without any concern for whether members of his creation can understand them, though they are certainly bound by them. The language borrows heavily from the King James Bible, even when describing a bunch of unshowered dudes in Blood Meridian :

Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat … wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

Here is McCarthy’s God: a deranged psycho who not only tolerates his world’s atrocities but conceives of them in these strange and inhuman terms.

For some critics, a little of this goes way too far. “To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy’s life, from a knifefight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch,” B. R. Myers wrote in The Atlantic 21 years ago . He quoted a particularly wacky excerpt from All the Pretty Horses and remarked, “It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank.” Blood Meridian smacked the skepticism right out of me the first time I read it, but I have read it and most of McCarthy’s other novels again since, this time with skepticism reinforced. Was I in the presence of divine wrath, or being punked? I concluded that any novel whose diction conjures questions of theodicy as well as the ghost of Allen Funt has something going for it.

The novels McCarthy published in 2022, at the age of 89, permanently resolve the question of whether McCarthy is a great novelist, or Louis L’Amour with a thesaurus. The booming, omnipotent narrative voice, which first appeared in McCarthy’s Western novels of the 1980s and had already begun to fade in No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006), has ebbed almost entirely in these books—perhaps like the voice of Yahweh himself, as he transitioned from interventionist to absentee in the Old Testament. What remain are human voices, which is to say characters, contending with one another and with their own fears and regrets, as they face the prospect of the godless void that awaits them. The result is heavy but pleasurable, and together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career.

From the July/August 2001 issue: B. R. Myers’s “A Reader’s Manifesto”

The plots are surreal, and the characters speak often of their dreams. The principal doomed dreamers in these novels are siblings whose formal education exceeds that of all previous McCarthy characters combined: Bobby Western and his younger sister, Alicia. Their father worked on the Manhattan Project, and for his Promethean sins the next generation was punished. Alicia and Bobby shared a vague, incestuous erotic bond and (even more deviant) the curse of genius.

Bobby, the protagonist of The Passenger , studied physics at Caltech but forsook science to race cars in Europe; after an ugly accident, he took up work as a salvage diver based in New Orleans. This novel, released first, is set in the early ’80s, some 10 years after Alicia killed herself. Stella Maris does not stand on its own and is best understood as an appendix to The Passenger . It belongs completely to Alicia and consists of a transcription of clinical interviews with a Dr. Cohen at a Wisconsin mental hospital shortly before her suicide. A math prodigy who studied at the University of Chicago and in France, Alicia left graduate training while struggling with anorexia and florid schizophrenic hallucinations. She is a key figure in The Passenger , too: Nine italicized sequences interspersed throughout Bobby’s story recount her conversations with a hairless, deformed taunter called the Thalidomide Kid, or just the Kid. The Kid acts as a ringmaster and spokesperson for a company of other hallucinatory figures. If this roster of dramatis personae is hurting your brain, then the effect is probably intended, because not one of the characters is psychologically well.

The plot of The Passenger is mercifully simple—and meandering, as McCarthy’s critics have complained of his books in general. Bobby is tormented by grief for having failed to save Alicia. His office dispatches him to search for survivors of a small passenger plane that crashed in shallow water. He finds corpses and signs of tampering. Someone got to the plane first. When he’s back on land, men “dressed like Mormon missionaries” track him down, interrogate him, and suggest that one of the plane’s passengers is unaccounted for. Their persecution intensifies, and Bobby (a quintessential McCarthy figure: laconic, cunning, prone to calamitous big decisions and canny small ones) spends the rest of the novel fleeing.

Bobby’s friends—chief among them the libertine fraudster Sheddan and a trans woman named Debbie, a stripper—are no less Felliniesque than the cast that appears in his dead sister’s hallucinations. Most of the novel is dialogue—if the thunderous omniscient narrator is listening, he’s not interested—and by turns tender, ironic, bitter, and searching. Debbie, like many characters in the novel, is literate and philosophical, and funny. She describes her heartbreak as she realized late one night that she was alone in the world. “I was lying there and I thought: If there is no higher power then I’m it. And that just scared the shit out of me. There is no God and I am she.” They are lowlifes and drunkards, but the sorts of lowlifes and drunkards who keep you lurking by them at the bar, even though you know they’ll rob you or break your heart. What will they say next? A line pilfered from Shakespeare or Unamuno? A revelation about the hereafter—or about yourself?

The Shakespeare is no coincidence—and of course Shakespeare, too, was weak on plot; as William Hazlitt and later Bloom affirmed, the characters are what matter. McCarthy’s Sheddan is an elongated Falstaff, skinny where Falstaff is fat, despite dining out constantly in the French Quarter on credit cards stolen from tourists. But like Falstaff, he is witty, and capable of uttering only the deepest verities whenever he is not telling outright lies. Bobby regularly shares in his stolen food and drink, and their dialogue—mostly Sheddan’s side of it—provides the sharpest statement of Bobby’s bind.

“A life without grief is no life at all,” Sheddan tells him. “But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.” The characters constantly tell each other about their dreams. Every barstool is an analyst’s couch, and every conversation an interpretation of the night’s omens. Sheddan’s response to the void, which he sees with a clarity equal to Bobby’s and Alicia’s, is to live riotously. “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares,” he tells Bobby, “and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.”

Alicia has no such wise interlocutors. Stella Maris is really an extended monologue, her shrink’s contribution little more than comically minimal prompts. (“I should say that I only agreed to chat,” she reminds him at the outset. “Not to any kind of therapy.”) Critics who have doubted McCarthy’s ability to write a female character must acknowledge that she is as idiosyncratically fucked-up as any of the protagonists in his previous oeuvre. If Sheddan is Falstaff, Alicia is Hamlet: voluble, funny, self-absorbed, and obsessed with the point, or pointlessness, of her continued survival. She is also completely nuts and, like Hamlet (whom she and Sheddan both quote, impishly and repeatedly), orders of magnitude too smart ever to be cured of what ails her. Bobby has a touch of Hamlet too, or possibly Ophelia—though his voyages into the watery depths are all round-trip.

Together they know too much, in almost every sense of that charged phrase. They know love, of a type one would be better off not knowing. Bobby has seen too much underwater. He and Alicia, cursed with a panoptic knowledge of science, literature, and philosophy, have reached a level of awareness indistinguishable from despair. The pursuit of Bobby by the mysterious Mormonlike men suggests that he has stumbled on forbidden facts (about criminals? extraterrestrials?). Alicia, too, seems to have arrived at certain bedrock truths about philosophy and math, and checked out of reality upon discovering how little even she, a woman of immeasurable intelligence, can understand. (Her trajectory mimics that of her mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, a real-life mathematician who gave up math, nearly starved himself to death, and became obsessed with the nature of dreams .) Her tone when speaking of the subject that once enthralled her is mournful. “When the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever,” she says, “I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.”

Long stretches of both novels involve discussions of neutrons, gluons, proof theory, and other arcana from modern physics and philosophy. One of the few points of agreement among physicists is that the world is stranger than humans tend to think, especially at extremes of size and time: What you see with your own eyes is definitely not what you get. The Passenger and Stella Maris treat that spooky observation and its implications with the reverence they deserve. No actual math intrudes, and the discussions of technical subjects is Stoppardesque—accurate and playful and accessible, and nevertheless daunting to readers unacquainted with surnames like Glashow, Grothendieck, and Dirac. (No first names are included, not that they would help anyone who needed them.) McCarthy’s books have always been intimidating, even alienating. Now it’s the characters, not the narrator, who do the alienating.

Alicia’s death is foretold on the first page of the first novel. Bobby’s is left ambiguous, and little is spoiled by my noting that time and space are pretzeled, that the nature of reality itself is suspect, and that he sometimes wishes that the car crash he suffered in Europe, just around the time when his sister was about to kill herself, had killed him rather than put him in a coma. “I’m not dead,” Bobby tells Sheddan, who replies, “We wont quibble.”

These novels are enduring puzzles. Several readings have left the nature of their reality still enigmatic to me. Any novels as suffused with dreams, hallucination, and speculation as the two of them are will invite doubt as to what is really happening. “Do you believe in an afterlife?” the psychiatrist asks Alicia. “I dont believe in this one,” she responds. Bobby and Alicia both have visions that call into question the nature of existence, and they are both fluent in the disorienting logic of the quantum-mechanical world. Having plumbed reality’s depths, they are not sure whether to come back to the surface to join those who live in the world of the normal, like Sheddan and his gang. By my second reading I started to feel like I had remained down there on the seafloor with them, in a state of meditative loneliness that no other book in recent memory has inspired.

Sheddan seems to have tasted that loneliness, and found existential solace in literature, even of the most savage sort. “Any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire,” he says at one point, having just noted Bobby’s father’s role in building apocalyptic munitions. I wonder whether Sheddan is accusing his own creator here, and his tendency toward violence. McCarthy’s early southern-gothic period, comprising the four novels he published from 1965 to 1979, were Faulknerian, and at times darkly comic. Then came an even darker Melvillean middle, set in the Southwest and Mexico—nightmarish in Blood Meridian and romantic in All the Pretty Horses (1992)—and a desolate late period, with No Country and The Road .

Put another way, the early novels took place on a human scale, and Blood Meridian was about contests among humanoid creatures so violent and warlike that they might be gods and demons, a Western Götterdämmerung. The protagonist of the Border Trilogy was like a human on an expedition through this inhuman landscape. And the late novels featured humans forsaken by the gods and pitted against one another, or in the case of No Country , contending with demons and losing. McCarthy’s latest, and probably last, novels represent a return to human concerns, but ones—love, death, guilt, illusion—experienced and scrutinized on the highest existential plane.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering, on hearing the news of two forthcoming McCarthy books, whether they would be noticeably geriatric in their energy, with that spectral quality familiar from other late literary creations. (There are many counterexamples, of course: the silvery vitality of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein , the comic bitterness of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger .) Such valedictory works are rarely among an author’s best. But as a pair, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an achievement greater than Blood Meridian , his best earlier work, or The Road , his best recent one. In the new novels, McCarthy again sets bravery and ingenuity loose amid inhumanity. In Blood Meridian , the young protagonist confronts a ruthless demigod and tells him off. In No Country , Llewelyn Moss beholds the inevitability of his own destruction and that of everyone he cares about, and shoots back at the demon who pursues him. The Border Trilogy is about a boy who leaves home and discovers, with equal parts courage and ignorance, a world harsher to his heart and body than he had known.

Now we see characters whose vision of the world is hideous from the start. And the grappling with this vision is more direct and more profound. The McCarthy of previous novels did not appear to have much of an answer to the question that his imagination invited, a question that goes back to the ancient Greeks: What does a mortal do when all that matters is in the hands of the gods, or, in their absence, no one’s? An almost-nonagenarian will of course think more acutely than a younger writer about fading from existence.

From the May 2020 issue: “Variations on a Phrase by Cormac McCarthy,” a poem by Linda Gregerson

Just as Alicia imagines a final flickering glow of mathematical truth, Sheddan proposes to be a final holdout of humanism. He says he knows that Bobby has, like Sheddan, a heart whose loneliness is salved by literature. “But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage?” Wondering about the end of the age of literate culture, he tells his old friend, “The legacy of the word is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.” These novels feel like McCarthy’s effort to produce such words, and to react to the dying of the light with Sheddan’s vigor rather than Bobby’s and Alicia’s despair. The results are not weakly flickering. They are incandescent with life.

This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “Cormac McCarthy Has Never Been Better.”

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Cormac McCarthy’s First Books in 16 Years Are a Genius Reinvention

C ormac McCarthy, the now 89-year-old winner of both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize , whose work is compared, not infrequently, to Moby Dick and the Bible , has spent more than two decades as a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute think tank. The list of operating principles for the institute (which he wrote), reads in part: “If you know more than anybody else about a subject, we want to talk to you.”

With his two staggering new novels, the companions The Passenger and Stella Maris, it’s clear that McCarthy—best known for delivering stark, gory tales of morality and depravity—has been inspired by his time at the think tank talking to the world’s greatest mathematicians and physicists. His first works of fiction to be published in 16 years begin in familiar territory but push his ambitions to the very boundaries of human understanding, where math and science are still just theory.

In The Passenger, the first of the two books, Bobby Western is a 37-year-old deep-sea salvage diver operating mostly in the Gulf of Mexico—dangerous but lucrative work that’s not unlike exploring a foreign planet. One night Bobby and his dive partner receive a strange assignment: a small passenger jet has crashed in the water off the coast of Pass Christian, Miss., and they must dive 40 ft. under the surface to assess the situation. When the pair finds the wreck, they encounter nine bodies sitting buckled in their seats, “their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation.” In addition to the oddly intact fuselage, other things are out of place. The pilot’s flight bag is gone. The plane’s black box has been neatly removed from the instrumentation panel. And a 10th passenger, listed on the manifest, is missing completely. Bobby’s partner is spooked. “You think there’s already been someone down there, don’t you?” he asks.

Soon Bobby is beset by suited men—agents of an unnamed government entity—flipping their badges at him and asking him questions. Then his friend goes down on a dive and doesn’t come back up.

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In many ways, Bobby resembles Llewelyn Moss, the protagonist of McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men: laconic, capable if a bit hapless, and the subject of dangerous intrigues outside of his scope. The difference is that Bobby has book smarts as well. His father was a scientist on the Manhattan Project who rubbed shoulders with Oppenheimer et al. while they perfected, as Bobby’s university friend Long John puts it, “the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole cities full of innocent people as they slept in their beds.”

Bobby gave up physics to travel around Europe as a midtier race-car driver before starting his career in diving. Both pursuits appeal because they offer him momentary relief from not only his own intelligence but also his grief. Long John diagnoses the final integral component of Bobby’s character: “He is in love with his sister. But of course it gets worse. He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead.”

McCarthy alternates chapters of The Passenger between the mystery at Bobby’s hands and conversations that his younger sister Alicia—the most brilliant in a family of prodigies, who died by suicide nearly 10 years prior—has with figures of her schizophrenic hallucinations. Their ringleader, whom she has come to call “the Thalidomide Kid,” is a bald, scarred imp about 3 ft. tall, with “flippers” instead of arms. (“He looked like he’d been brought into the world with icetongs.”) The Kid taunts Alicia in strange idioms in between discursions on time, language, and perception. From one of his linguistically withering rants: “Well mysteries just abound don’t they? Before we mire up too deep in the accusatory voice it might be well to remind ourselves that you can’t misrepresent what has yet to occur.” Fans of McCarthy’s work will agree that this novel’s villain is a far sight more loquacious than No Country for Old Men ’s Anton Chigurh. (“Call it.”)

Narratively speaking, the book is more interested in expanding the scope of its own mystery than in solving it. The Bobby sections depict him avoiding the plot entirely—he mostly has lunch with friends and converses with them about his past, physics, or philosophy. Don’t come here for a thriller about a plane crash, but the pages do turn with remarkable ease. From the initial mystery of a missing person, the novel explodes outward like an atomic chain reaction to the very face of God, at the intersection of mathematics and faith.

Is this sounding like a lot? It is. The Passenger also happens to be something of a masterpiece, an unsolvable equation left up on the blackboard for the bold to puzzle over. Readers have been waiting years for this novel, which McCarthy has teased from time to time, dating back to before The Road, which he published in 2006. It is his most ambitious work, or perhaps a better word would be weirdest. But it’s held together with wit and chuckle-out-loud humor, which can be sparse in his other novels (see the apocalyptic violence of Blood Meridian ). And it’s genuinely fun to read throughout—although readers who come to this book because they enjoyed an airport paper-back edition of The Road while on a short flight might be left wide-eyed and blinking.

Stella Maris, the slimmer companion, to be published in December, is just over 200 pages’ worth of Passenger ’s late sister Alicia’s dialogues with her psychiatrist after she has institutionalized herself toward the end of her life, suffering under the power of her own intellect. It offers a few more clues, but mostly deepens the various mysteries on offer in the first novel. “Mathematics,” she tells her doctor, who struggles to keep up, “is ultimately a faith-based initiative.”

In all of his books, McCarthy is a gearhead, a man obsessed with hardware and the nuts and bolts of things. There are no planes and cars in The Passenger, only “JetStars” and “1968 Dodge Chargers with 426 Hemi engines.” A person doesn’t glance at their watch; they glance at their white gold Patek Philippe Calatrava. There are whole sections that could read almost as instructional home repair or auto maintenance: “The teeth had begun to strip off of the cluster gear until the box seized up and then the rear U-joint came uncoupled and the drive shaft went clanking off across the concourse … ” It’s been said that when McCarthy visited the set of the movie adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, he spent most of his time with the props master talking about guns.

So it makes sense that at this stage in his career, the author would push in his chips and attempt to understand the mechanical clockwork of reality itself. Like Bach ’s concertos, these triumphant novels depart the realm of art and encroach upon science, aimed at some Platonic point beyond our reckoning where all spheres converge.

It’s a rare thing to see a writer employ the tools of fiction in order to make a genuine contribution to what we know, and what we can know, about material existence. Put differently, the ideal audience for these books are Fields Medal recipients , but they’re still a privilege and a hoot for the rest of us to read. And if we can’t understand everything McCarthy is writing about, one suspects that he just might.

Mancusi is the author of the novel A Philosophy of Ruin.

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The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy review – a deep dive into the abyss

A salvage diver plumbs mysterious depths in Cormac McCarthy’s glorious sunset song of a novel

I t’s the depth of the darkness that spooks Bobby Western, the haunted man at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s extraordinary new novel. Western works as a salvage diver in the Mexican Gulf, tending to sunken barges and stricken oil rigs. He’s kicking up clouds in the clay-coloured water and pressing further into the unknown with every weighted step. His colleagues are blase but experience has taught him to take care. He asks: “You ever bump into something down there that you didn’t know what it was?”

Published a full 16 years after the Pulitzer prize-winning The Road , The Passenger is like a submerged ship itself; a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller. McCarthy’s generational saga covers everything from the atomic bomb to the Kennedy assassination to the principles of quantum mechanics. It’s by turns muscular and maudlin, immersive and indulgent. Every novel, said Iris Murdoch, is the wreck of a perfect idea. This one is enormous. It’s got locked doors and blind turns. It contains skeletons and buried gold.

Some 40 feet below the surface, Western explores a downed charter jet. Inside the fuselage, he picks his way past the floating detritus and the glassy-eyed victims, still buckled in their seats. The plane carried eight passengers but one appears to be missing and the subsequent investigation hints at a government cover-up. Except that this may be a red herring; we’re still in the book’s shallows. Western’s troubles, we realise, are altogether closer to home. McCarthy began work on The Passenger back in the mid-1980s, before his career-making Border trilogy; building it piecemeal and revisiting it down the years. Small wonder, then, that this family tragedy feels filleted, part of a larger whole and trailing so many loose ends that it requires a self-styled “coda” – a second novel, Stella Maris, published in November – to complete the story. So this is a book without guardrails, an invitation to get lost. We’re constantly bumping into dark objects and wondering what they mean.

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Ostensibly the narrative sees Western pinballing around early 80s New Orleans, hobnobbing with the locals, trying to outflank his enemies. But it also casts back through the decades, mining his quasi-incestuous bond with his suicidal sister, Alicia. Along the way it introduces us to her nightmarish hallucinations: “the Thalidomide Kid and the old lady with the roadkill stole and Bathless Grogan and the dwarves and the Minstrel Show”. Alicia likens these demons to a troupe of penny-dreadful entertainers. They materialise at her bedside whenever she skips her meds. On a prose level, McCarthy – now 89 – continues to fire on all cylinders. His writing is potent, intoxicating, offsetting luxuriant dialogue with spare, vivid descriptions. The bonfire leaning in the sea wind; the burning bits of brush hobbling away up the beach. As a storyteller, though, I suspect that he is deliberately winding down, wrapping up. This novel plays out as a great dying fall. Western and Alicia, we learn, are children of the bomb. Their father was a noted nuclear physicist who helped split the atom, leading to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Western, in his youth, studied physics himself. He became familiar with protons and quarks, leptons and string theory, but gave up his calling for a life of blue-collar drifting. Quantum mechanics, he feels, can only take us so far. “I don’t know if it actually explains anything,” he says. “You can’t illustrate the unknown.”

McCarthy’s interest in physics has been stoked by his time as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit research centre. Since 2014 he’s largely been holed up with the scholars, exploring the limits of science – and presumably of language as well – only to conclude that no system is flawless. High-concept plots take on water; machine-tooled narratives break down. And so it is with The Passenger, which sets out as an existential chase thriller in the mould of No Country for Old Men before collapsing in on itself. Western might outpace his pursuers but he can’t escape his own history. So he heads into the desert, alone, to watch the oil refineries burning in the distance and observe the carpet-coloured vipers coiled in the grass at his feet. “The abyss of the past into which the world is falling,” he thinks. “Everything vanishing as if it had never been.”

What a glorious sunset song of a novel this is. It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic. McCarthy started out as the laureate of American manifest destiny, spinning his hard-bitten accounts of rapacious white men. He ends his journey, perhaps, as the era’s jaundiced undertaker. Come friendly bombs. Come rising oceans. The old world is dying and probably not before time, and The Passenger steals in to turn out all the lights.

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The Passenger

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The bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

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"A beguiling, surpassingly strange novel by the renowned—and decidedly idiosyncratic—author of Blood Meridian (1982) and The Road (2006)...Enigmatic, elegant, extraordinary: a welcome return after a too-long absence." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Chilling and masterly....His prose frequently approaches the Shakespearean, ranging from droll humor to the rapid-fire spouting of quotable fecundity. Dialogues click into place like a finely tuned engine. McCarthy has somehow added a new register to his inimitable voice. Long ensconced in the literary firmament, McCarthy further bolsters his claim for the Mount Rushmore of the literary arts." - Booklist (starred review) "A rich story of an underachieving salvage diver in 1980 New Orleans...This thriller narrative is intertwined with the story of Western's sister, Alicia…He dazzles with his descriptions of a beautifully broken New Orleans…The book's many pleasures will leave readers aching for the final installment." - Publishers Weekly "After sixteen years of characteristic seclusion, McCarthy returns with a one-two punch... The Passenger is an elegiac meditation on guilt, grief, and spirituality. Packed with textbook McCarthy hallmarks, like transgressive behaviors and cascades of ecstatic language, it's a welcome return from a legend who's been gone too long." - Esquire

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The novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road , and No Country for Old Men —the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. He died in June 2023 aged 89.

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Cormac McCarthy Peers Into the Abyss

There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.”

McCarthy’s novel “ The Road ” (2006) can be seen as both the fulfillment and the transformation of this profligately gifted stylist, because in it the two styles justified themselves and came together to make a third style, of punishing and limpid beauty. The afflatus mode was vindicated by the post-apocalyptic horrors of the material. It might have been hard to credit, say, contemporary Knoxville as the ruined city that McCarthy describes in his earlier novel “ Suttree ” (1979), a giant carcass that “lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears . . . vectors of nowhere,” and all the rest. But the imagination had much less difficulty in “The Road,” where a similar rhetoric floats over the ashen landscape of an annihilating catastrophe. Meanwhile, the deflatus mode suddenly made both literary and ethical sense, since a world nearly stripped of people and objects would necessitate a language of primal simplicity, as if words had to learn all over again how to find their referents. One of the most moving scenes in “The Road” involves a father and son discovering an unopened can of Coke, as if in some parody of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, with the father having to explain to the son just what this fabled object once was.

The third style holds in beautiful balance the oracular and the ordinary. In “The Road,” a lean poetry captures many ruinous beauties—for instance, the way that ash, a “soft black talc,” blows through the abandoned streets “like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor.” This third style has, in truth, always existed in McCarthy’s novels, though sometimes it appeared to lead a slightly fugitive life. Amid all the gory sublimities of “ Blood Meridian ” (1985), one could still find something as lovely and precise as “the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs,” or a description of yellow-eyed wolves “that trotted neat of foot.” In “Suttree,” published six years before the overheated “Blood Meridian,” this third style was easier to find, the writer frequently abjuring the large, imprecise adverb for the smaller, exact one—“When he put his hand up her dress her legs fell open bonelessly”—or the perfect little final noun: “while honeysuckle bloomed in the creek gut.”

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There may be several reasons that McCarthy’s simpler third style is so often the dominant rhetoric in his two new novels, “ The Passenger ” and “ Stella Maris ” (both Knopf). Their author is nearing ninety, and perhaps a relatively unburdened late style tempts the loaded rhetorician who has become “weary of congestion” (as Henry James assessed late Shakespeare). A character in “The Passenger” describes this condition with appropriate plainness: “To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening yourself. . . . Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision.” A likelier reason is that, for the first time in his career, McCarthy is aiming to write fiction about “ideas”: these two novels contain extended conversations about physics, language, and the symbolic languages of music and mathematics.

Of course, his earlier novels explored “themes” and, in their way, ideas; an academic industry loyally decodes McCarthy’s every blood-steeped move around evil, suffering, God or no-God, the Bible, genocidal American expansion, the Western, environmental catastrophe, and so on. But those novels did not purvey, and in some sense could have no space for, intellectual discourse. These books were inhospitable to intellectuals, with their characteristic chatter. McCarthy’s two dominant styles conspired to void his fiction of such discourse. The afflatus mode gestured toward its themes so stormily that ideas were deprived of the thing that gives them power, their ability to refer. There is mathematics and theology in the following sentence from “Suttree,” but of the most opaque kind: “These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion.” At the same time, the deflatus style wicks away all thought—William Carlos Williams’s motto, “No ideas but in things,” has always come to mind when McCarthy is trudging along in this minimalist mode.

In the new pair of novels, which separately tell the life stories of two brilliant and frustrated physicists, Bobby Western and his younger sister, Alicia, a fresh space is made to enable the exchange of ideas, and the rhetorical consequences are felt in the very textures of the fiction. The old, bifurcated McCarthy is still evident in every sentence—my earlier unsourced examples of afflatus and deflatus were all from “The Passenger”—but the new hospitality to physics entails a hospitality to the rational that hasn’t exactly bulked large in McCarthy’s most celebrated work. His ear for dialogue has always been impeccable; in these novels, in place of the portentous reticence of McCarthy’s earlier conversations, whole sections are given over to long scenes of lucidly urbane dialogue. People think and speak rationally, mundanely, intelligently, crazily, as they do in real life; only for a writer as strange as McCarthy would this innovation deserve attention. And along with the excellent dialogue there are scores of lovely noticings, often of the natural world. In Montana, pheasants are seen crossing the road “with their heads bowed like wrongdoers.” A fire on a Mediterranean beach: “The flames sawed in the wind.” Taking off over Mexico City, “the plane lifted up through the blue dusk into sunlight again and banked over the city and the moon dropped down the glass of the cabin like a coin falling through the sea. . . . Far below the shape of the city in its deep mauve grids like a vast motherboard.”

“The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” function together and apart, a bit like those early stereo recordings where, as it were, you can hear Ringo and Paul on the left speaker and George and John on the right. “The Passenger” tells the story of Bobby; “Stella Maris” tells the story of Alicia. The two are the children of a Jewish physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. They grew up in Los Alamos, and both showed a remarkable aptitude for mathematics. Bobby got a scholarship to Caltech, but instead of earning a doctorate he dropped out, because he wasn’t a good enough mathematician. As he explains, the history of physics is full of people who gave up in this way, because they couldn’t add anything to “the rare pantheon of world-shaping theories.” Buoyed by a family legacy, Bobby went to Europe and raced cars (Formula 2), until a crash in 1972 landed him in a coma. It’s 1980 when we join Bobby’s adventuring in “The Passenger”; he is thirty-seven and is working out of New Orleans as a deep-sea salvage diver.

Bobby wishes he’d remained in his coma, because he wakened to a world of grief. Alicia, far more brilliant than her brother but plagued by schizophrenia and depression, committed suicide not long after his accident. Alicia is thus only a memory in “The Passenger,” though the book is punctuated by scenes that depict her hallucinations—she holds extended, antic conversations with a bullying bald dwarf known as the Kid (a nod, perhaps, to a character of the same name in “Blood Meridian”). Later in the novel, this same hallucinatory figure visits an ailing Bobby, and converses with him, too.

“Stella Maris,” named for a psychiatric institution in Wisconsin that the twenty-year-old Alicia has checked herself into, is about half the length of “The Passenger,” and consists of transcribed therapeutic conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. This novel is set in 1972, with Bobby still unconscious in Italy, and Alicia contemplating her eventual suicide. Like Bobby, Alicia has abandoned mathematics—not because she isn’t good enough but because she’s too good. She belongs to that tradition of Wittgensteinian geniuses who find regular ratiocination far too easy, quickly exhaust all available formulas, and spend the rest of their troubled lives brilliantly picketing the gates of their official disciplines. She graduated from the University of Chicago at the age of sixteen, was offered a fellowship at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, near Paris, and began corresponding with the great French-based mathematician Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014), himself a rebel genius who at a young age somehow exhausted mathematics, or was exhausted by it, or both.

These two doomed Mensa mates, Alicia and Bobby, are full of surprises. Alicia is not only a mathematical genius but a gifted violinist. She spent her portion of the family legacy on a rare Amati violin, for which she paid two hundred and thirty thousand dollars, sight unseen. Naturally, she abandoned serious playing as soon as she realized that she wouldn’t be among “the top ten” in the world. Alicia is also very beautiful—what another character, male, of course, calls “drop dead gorgeous.” Bobby may not have been at her intellectual level, but he’s a walking Renaissance of his own. When someone quotes Cioran to him in a bar, he replies with the appropriate retort from Plato. He has played mandolin in a professional bluegrass band, can recognize at a glance a Patek Philippe Calatrava as a “pre-war” watch, and drives a 1973 Maserati Bora (which I half expected to come kitted out with special weapons and an ejector seat). He’s enigmatically solitary. With certain friends, he’ll occasionally expatiate on matters mathematical, but more often he expresses himself in tough-guy word bullets, like Steve McQueen playing a physicist. When he collects his Maserati from a storage facility, and is asked by the man who works in the office how long the drive to Tennessee will be (Bobby is visiting his grandmother), the exchange is pelleted out thus:

That’s a pretty good drive, aint it? What, is she fixin to kick off and leave you some scratch? Not that I know of. How long a drive is it? I dont know. Six hundred and some odd miles. How long will that take you? Maybe six hours. Bullshit. Five and a half? Get your ass out of here.

“To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die,” Harold Brodkey wrote of a fictional heroine. And credulity, too. Alicia is the womanly total package who slays all men, and Bobby is the manly total package all women would surely die for. In an early scene, a woman in a bar admires his ass.

So at the human level, at the level of verisimilitude, these two companion novels are hardly serious. Perhaps McCarthy seeks to indemnify himself against the charge of authorial wish fulfillment by dooming his fantastical characters to early demises. We learn that the great, almost unspeakable tragedy of their lives is that the siblings loved each other too intensely for comfort. As a young teen-ager, Alicia wanted to become her brother’s lover; Bobby balked. Madness and lament followed; neither can exist for very long without the other. Both characters are also haunted by the legacy of their father’s work on the atomic bomb. To bulk out “The Passenger,” McCarthy hangs a fairly gestural paranoid plot over Bobby’s movements, and it’s this plot that gives the novel its title. Inspecting a private jet that has sunk off the Gulf Coast, Bobby and his colleague notice that one of the passengers on the manifest—the rest of whom, watery corpses, are still strapped into their seats—seems to be missing. Soon enough, Bobby is being visited and surveilled by strange men who may or may not work for the F.B.I., and who are extremely interested in what he knows about this missing passenger. Eventually, the I.R.S. seizes Bobby’s accounts, and he heads out West—to Texas, Montana, Wyoming— where he lives for a while as a dilapidated outcast.

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But the paranoid plotline is just a pretext for getting Bobby on that tattered and eternal pilgrimage of McCarthy’s male heroes, each of whom might be named “the passenger,” and who journey along a path elemental and mythical enough to be called, from the start, and recurringly, “the road.” Officially, Bobby is pursued by the government, but really he’s pursued by the grief he feels at the loss of his sister, by the dubious legacy of his father’s work, and by that theological woundedness shared by so many McCarthy heroes. Such men are invariably figured as some variation on the theme of “the first person on earth or the last,” a version of which dutifully receives its annunciation in the course of this novel. By the end of “The Passenger,” Bobby has fetched up in an old windmill near the Mediterranean Sea, somewhere off the coast of Spain. He is now the “last pagan on earth,” “the last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens around him.” Familiar McCarthy territory, and easy enough to mock. But it would hardly be fair to these novels to neglect to add that, though the protagonists may be improbable, the writing, by and large, is not. The poignant scene, for instance, in which Bobby visits his grandmother in Tennessee is faultlessly written. Bobby’s evocations of Los Alamos and the Trinity nuclear test have an appropriately haunted power. (“Two. One. Zero. Then the sudden whited meridian.”) His solitary trek through the Western states yields sentence after sentence of delicate invention: “A squat ricepaper moon rode the lightwires.”

Bobby’s final pilgrimage can be seen as a tribute to the closing pages of “Suttree,” in which the eponymous character suffers a kind of hallucinated breakdown, and then leaves Knoxville, lighting out for the Territory as he exits the novel. But the clarity of McCarthy’s language in “The Passenger” contrasts sharply with the heady obscurantism of “Suttree.” When Bobby and Alicia talk to other characters in these new novels about twentieth-century mathematics and physics, McCarthy is forced to use a shared language of respectable rationality. Here is Alicia, explaining her interest in game theory to Dr. Cohen, with insider references to John von Neumann and the English mathematician John Horton Conway:

I spent a certain amount of time on game theory. There’s something seductive about it. Von Neumann got caught up in it. Maybe that’s not the right term. But I think I finally began to see that it promised explanations it wasnt capable of supplying. It really is game theory. It’s not something else. Conway or no Conway. Everything you start out with is a tool, but your hope is that it actually comprises a theory.

And here is Bobby on Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, and the discovery of the quark:

Still, it’s a simple enough idea. That nucleons are composed—as it were—of a small companionship of lesser particles. Groups of three. For the hadrons. All but identical. [Zweig] called them aces. He told me he didnt think anyone else could figure this out and that he had all the time in the world to formalize it. He didnt know that Murray was on his trail and that he had less than a year. In the end Murray called the particles quarks—after a line in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, referring to cottage cheese. Three quarks for Muster Mark. And he swept the field and won the Nobel Prize and George went into therapy. . . . Murray originally presented the theory as speculative. As a mathematical model. He always denied this later but I’ve read the papers. George on the other hand knew that it was a hard physical theory. Which of course it was.

McCarthy has had a close connection with the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute since its founding, by Gell-Mann and others, in 1984, and maintained long-standing friendships with Gell-Mann and Zweig, whom he met through the MacArthur Foundation. The reader can be fairly sure he’s had his physics and mathematics checked by those who know what they’re talking about. But these cannot be novels “about” mathematics, since the novelist lacks the power to do any mathematics. They are novels about mathematicians, and they stand or fall on their ability to make Bobby and Alicia plausible as such. So how do brilliant mathematicians think and talk? Since presumably a great deal of their thought and talk is mathematical, we confront again the problem we began with.

There are shrewd novelistic reasons, then, that these two books concern intellectuals who have abandoned their discipline—their rebellious abstinence releases McCarthy from having to represent his subjects doing any ongoing scientific work. Instead, as is fictively appropriate, we’re offered the drama of their disenchantment, along with their various emotional and metaphysical dilemmas: this is what the novelist can represent. Instead of math, we get the Maserati, the rare violin, the family connection to the atom bomb, and their star-crossed love for each other.

But this only returns us to the problem. Why are Bobby and Alicia written up as mathematicians rather than, respectively, as a race-car driver and a violinist? If neither character can be caught in the act of uttering or creating an original mathematical idea, then, curiously enough, these are merely novels about the idea of mathematical ideas. Practically speaking, this means that Bobby and Alicia must sound like “geniuses” while delivering clever and diligently knowing reports (full of famous names, and so on) on twentieth-century developments in physics and mathematics aimed at ordinary, non-mathematical readers. These are novels in love with the idea of scientific and musical genius. And how do geniuses sound? They speak rapidly and gnomically, impatient with their sluggish interlocutors. They are willful, eccentric, solitary. They are in mental crisis, close to breakdown and suicide. They are imperious around success and failure: they announce that they stopped playing the violin because it was impossible to be in the world’s top ten. They are obsessed with intelligence, their own and other people’s. Of Robert Oppenheimer, Bobby says, “A lot of very smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made,” while Alicia says, “People who knew Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, said that he was the smartest man they’d ever met.”

Do geniuses actually sound like this? Well, people who are fixated on the idea of genius perhaps sound like this. But out of this miming of genius—which, alas, is what McCarthy appears to be doing in these books—comes at least one telling idea, both a correlate and a symptom of the novelist’s apparent love affair with the grand performance of higher mathematics. It’s the idea that words are latecomers to truth, trailing numbers and music. This comes close to Pythagoras’ idea that numbers encode divinity—mathematics and music are taken to be symbolic languages with a direct connection to truth, whereas language is a comparatively belated human creation that clumsily approximates the truth. Alicia puts it directly: “And intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.” When Dr. Cohen asks her how we have come to this idea that “intelligence is numerical,” she replies that “maybe we actually got there by counting. For a million years before the first word was ever said. If you want an IQ of over a hundred and fifty you’d better be good with numbers.” Elsewhere, Alicia invokes Schopenhauer to the effect that “if the universe vanished music alone would remain.”

So music and mathematics come before language, and they come after language; they may outlive us all. We made language up, but we found mathematics, premade. This sort of Platonism is commonplace among mathematicians and musicians (a character in “The Passenger” calls Bobby a “mathematical platonist”). But note how Alicia, or the novelist who created her, arrives at this insight: not by arguing it as such but via the barstool admiration of sheer mathematical I.Q. Intelligence just is numbers, while words are left scudding along the lower levels. To traffic in serious mathematics is to commune with truth; to traffic in words, to merely write novels, is to produce dim approximations of the truth. This is what too many colloquies at the Santa Fe Institute will do to a novelist’s self-esteem.

Things get interesting when this mathematical mysticism is subjected to McCarthy’s characteristic tragic Gnosticism. A religious believer might conclude that the truth mathematics encodes can only be God’s truth, and that God is therefore a mathematician. Dr. Cohen puts this to Alicia, and she demurs, because she doesn’t appear to believe in God. The great mathematician Kurt Gödel seems to have been some kind of Deist, who believed that mathematics does not merely represent truths inherent in the universe but reveals the universe’s higher design. Alicia is lured by such Deism—what she calls, in McCarthyish language, the idea of mathematics as “some shimmering palimpsest of eternal abidement.” But she can’t quite bring herself to accept that the universe is intelligent in this way, or that mathematics, as Platonism holds, discloses truths that can be independent of human life. If the world is not intelligent, then when it finally explodes or melts or runs out of oxygen all human intelligence will disappear, including music and mathematics. Schopenhauer had it wrong. For Gödel, mathematics presumably had no limits, and its truths persist even after the last human being has quit the world, Alicia speculates. She doesn’t believe that; consideration of the end of the world appears to mark the limit of her faith in the “religious” primacy of mathematics.

Like her brother, like most of McCarthy’s earlier protagonists, Alicia is a Gnostic pessimist. She believes that the world has been abandoned by God, or that, at best, we are involved in a terrible struggle with a substitute God, a diabolical deity. “At the core of reality,” she says, “lies a deep and eternal demonium.” At the age of ten or so, Alicia felt the presence of this diabolical God. She had a dream vision of a gate, and she sensed that beyond this gate was a terrible presence that she could not see, or bear to see. She calls this Devil figure the Archatron. Now, if the only deity is in fact the Devil, and the world is the Devil’s creation, must mathematics, which tells the truth about this diabolical world, itself be diabolical? What if mathematics is the Archatron? Alicia doesn’t explicitly say so, but the idea haunts these two novels, for reasons that are obvious enough. In the twentieth century, mathematics enabled the invention of a bomb that could extinguish human life. Famously, Oppenheimer said that, when he witnessed the Trinity explosion, a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita came to mind: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The world turned Gnostic in 1945. Or, as Alicia puts it: “The world has created no living thing it does not intend to destroy.” Bobby reflects that he owes his existence to Adolf Hitler (his parents met at Oak Ridge), that “the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.”

Sure enough, the area where McCarthy can be authoritatively eloquent—can be himself—is the realm not of numbers, where he has only the idea of “genius,” but of metaphysics, where he has all the resources of language. The new and welcome thing in “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” is the lucidity of this bitter metaphysics. McCarthy’s earlier books were so shrouded in obscurity, rang with so much hieratic shrieking and waving, that it was perfectly possible to extract five contradictory theological ideas at once from their fiery depths. That was why “The Road” could be read as both Beckettian pessimism and last-ditch Christian optimism, with its orphaned little boy left, at the end, to carry with him the light of the divine and the flame of the human. Can the world be repaired or not? Is it divinely intelligent or not? These new novels flush McCarthy out of his rhetorical cover, and his decidedly austere and unillusioned answer to both of these questions is no. In a world lit by the “evil sun” of nuclear invention, all history, Bobby thinks, is nothing more than “a rehearsal for its own extinction.” And, when the world finally kills itself off, nothing will be left—not words, not music, not mathematics, not God. Not even the Devil. ♦

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New Times, New Thinking.

The Passenger: The phantom world of Cormac McCarthy

In The Passenger, his first novel for 16 years, the great American writer offers a study of living without answers.

By John Gray

“Habits of two million years’ duration are hard to break… The unconscious seems to know a great deal. What does it know about itself? Does it know that it’s going to die… And is it really so good at solving problems or is it just that it keeps its own counsel about the failures? How does it have this understanding which we might well envy?”

This passage comes from an essay, “The Kekulé Problem”, by Cormac McCarthy, which was published in Nautilus , a science magazine, in April 2017. The essay’s title refers to the German chemist August Friedrich August Kekulé (1829-96), who recounted discovering the ring-like shape of the benzene molecule after having a daydream of a snake swallowing its own tail, a symbol of the ouroboros – an image of renewal and rebirth in ancient Egyptian mythology.

As McCarthy frames it, the Kekulé problem is why the chemist’s unconscious mind didn’t simply tell him: “The molecule is in the form of a ring.” McCarthy’s answer is that language is a capacity that evolved recently. Throughout its evolutionary prehistory, humankind was guided by its prelinguistic animal brain, which continues to convey its messages to us in dreams, pictures and images: “There is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness.” The essay reflects discussions McCarthy had over many years at the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to the study of complexity in physical and social systems, which he has been visiting since the 1990s and where he is now a trustee.

It is hardly surprising that McCarthy is interested in the Kekulé problem. His books are an unrelenting struggle to say the unsayable. The sonorous cadences of Blood Meridian (1985) and the bone-dry sentences of No Country for Old Men (2005) are texts that use all the devices of language in order to convey experiences it cannot express. His last novel, The Road (2006), was an attempt at expressing the ineffable desolation of a post-apocalyptic planet and the grief of those who live in its ruins. Critics have detected the influence on him of Faulkner and Hemingway, but this is to understate his achievement. His new novel, The Passenger, shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need.

[See also: The secret world of Mick Herron ]

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Born in 1933 and having grown up in a middle-class family of Irish Catholics in a poor part of Knoxville, Tennessee, McCarthy dropped out of university and spent some years in the US Air Force. He has not surrendered to regular employment, or taken part in literary life. A rare interview in a 1992 New York Times profile by the art critic Richard B Woodward reported that when a local newspaper held a dinner in his honour, he courteously declined. He has not taught literature or given lectures. Before he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, an unconditional grant offered to persons of outstanding abilities, in 1981, he lived sparely, with long periods in what others might call poverty, devoting himself to writing.

His novels have been criticised because they contain much violence, as if this reflected some kind of morbidity in his work. In the New York Times interview he responds that it is the denial of violence in human life that is morbid: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this idea are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom.”

He is unflinching in depicting human behaviour in its ugliest forms. A short, neglected novel, Child of God (1973), deals with a serial killer, whose crimes are described in all their savagery as being recognisably human. In The Passenger a Vietnam veteran recalls flying out over the jungle and seeing elephants in clearings. Trying to protect the females and their children, the bulls would raise their trunks and challenge the gunships. The flyers responded by firing off rockets at them: “We never missed. And it would blow them up. They’d just fucking explode.” The veteran says he feels sorry for what he did. “They hadn’t done anything. And who were they going to see about it?… That’s what I regret.” But why did he do it? Is there an answer?

The Passenger is a study in living without answers. The traveller of the title is the missing tenth body in a sunken jet that crashed off the coast of New Orleans. The underwater wreckage is examined by the professional diver Bobby Western, a former mathematician and the son of a physicist who worked with Robert Oppenheimer devising the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Visiting Nagasaki after the war with a team of scientists, Bobby’s father found “everything was rusty… There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets… Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone… The living walked about but there was no place to go.”

Diving with a colleague to inspect the jet, Bobby finds the other nine passengers and crew buckled into their seats, their hair floating and their eyes “devoid of speculation”. The pilot’s flight bag and the plane’s black box cannot be found. Following the dive, Bobby is followed and questioned by men carrying badges; his rooms are ransacked, his car is taken away, his passport confiscated and his bank account closed. He goes on the run, ending up in a beach hut, wrapped in an old army blanket reading physics – “old poetry” – and trying to write letters to his schizophrenic sister Alicia, also a former mathematician, who died by suicide in an asylum many years previously. (A coda to The Passenger , Stella Maris , dealing with Alicia – the first novel McCarthy has written with a woman as its central protagonist – will be published later this year.) Walking the tide-line at dusk, Bobby looks back at his bare footprints filling with water, “then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night”.

[See also: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History at 30 ]

A blurring of barriers between private visions and consensus realities marks many of the episodes recounted in The Passenger . Bobby’s sister is regularly visited by a djinn, the Thalidomide Kid, a damaged creature with “flippers” that comments on her behaviour, sometimes in metaphysical terms: “To the seasoned traveller a destination is at best a rumour… The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless.”

The phantasm has something of the mocking quality displayed by the devil as he appears in Ivan’s delirium in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . A figure who arrives promising some sort of enlightenment, when the Kid departs, he leaves the scene looking more crepuscular and impenetrable than it did before he arrived. Many of the book’s scenes have a numinous, enigmatic quality that lingers in the mind. If The Passenger was a film, it would be made by David Lynch.

As he often does in his novels, McCarthy uses dialogue as a device, pointing to things that cannot be spoken. Many of these exchanges occur in the course of meals in New Orleans bars. In one of them, a sardonic, gin-drinking, cigar-smoking friend to whom Bobby has confided some of his difficulties observes: “We don’t move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet… It’s just that the passing of time is irrevocably the passing of you… Ultimately there is nothing to know and no one to know it… It’s an odd place, the world.”

As his friend is dying he sends Bobby a letter via one of the bars they frequented. He expresses the hope that in any afterlife there may be a waterhole where they could meet again. After the friend dies Bobby is visited “one last time” by his shade. Towards the end of their conversation the friend asks: “And what are we? Ten per cent biology and 90 per cent nightrumour.” Then the spectre vanishes.

Bobby fails to discover the identity of the missing passenger, or why “the Feds” have him under surveillance. Like others in his time, he is a cipher in an illegible history. A lawyer who offers to help him change his identity muses on the JFK assassination, convinced the evidence was tampered with. Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, a passenger “waiting for a ride that was never coming”. If there is a thread running throughout McCarthy’s novels, it is an absence of explanation.

After Bobby has moved to a shack on the dunes near Bay St Louis he is visited by the Kid. He tells Bobby his sister knew that in the end you can’t know anything: “You can’t get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same.” They debate whether there is an afterlife. Trudging along the shore, Bobby asks the Kid if he is an emissary. The Kid replies, “Of what?” Soaking and chilled, Bobby falls to his knees. The loss of knowing that his beloved sister died alone is beyond any other loss and unendurable. Looking up, he sees the small and shambling figure of the Kid receding down the rain-swept beach. Soon the djinn is gone.

In “The Kekulé Problem”, McCarthy wrote: “To put it as pithily as possibly – and as accurately – the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal.” This may seem a reductively materialist world-view, but in the most advanced sciences, matter is a ghostly affair, not wholly distinguishable from subjective experience. As one of Bobby’s lunch partners puts it: “Should science by some miracle forge on into the future it will uncover not only new laws of nature but new natures to have laws about… Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.”

In the elusive, indeterminate world of quantum physics, dialogues with the dead and with creatures that never existed may have a certain reality. Materialism of this kind is consistent with religion, though not of a sort that promises any redemption. According to Christianity, all that has been lost will finally be returned. There is a harmony concealed in life’s conflicts, a secret triumph in our sorrows and defeats, which will finally be revealed. Before Christianity, Plato promised a perfect realm beyond the shadows of the Cave. Monotheism and classical philosophy are both of them theodicies, attempts to justify evil and injustice as necessary parts of an unknown order in things.

The religion intimated in The Passenger is an older faith, in which there is no theodicy and nothing is revealed. As he blows out his lamp in his shack on the beach thinking still of his sister, Bobby knew that “on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly on his pallet in an unknown tongue”.

The Passenger By Cormac McCarthy Picador, 400pp, £20

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This article appears in the 19 Oct 2022 issue of the New Statesman, State of Emergency

Cormac McCarthy, 89, has a new novel — two, actually. And they’re almost perfect

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On the Shelf

Two New Novels by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger Knopf: 400 pages, $30 Stella Maris Knopf: 208 pages, $26 (December 6) If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Bobby Western is a salvage diver, a onetime physics graduate student who hangs out in dive bars with philosophically inclined roughnecks and thieves. It’s 1980 in New Orleans when Bobby’s quiet but perilous life takes a dangerous turn, sparking “ The Passenger ,” the new novel by Cormac McCarthy .

“The Passenger” is a brilliant book, a departure from McCarthy’s previous works that still feels of a piece. It’s set in the real world of the 20th century yet filled with the same elegiac language and drop-dead sentences of his antique “ Border Trilogy ” and the apocalyptic future of “ The Road .” The latter book, his best-known, won the Pulitzer Prize, was made into a film and was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club in 2007, pulling the publicity-shy author into the spotlight. This is his first novel to be published since.

The story of a haunted man on the run, it has McCarthy’s classic linguistic flair, plus Thomas Pynchon ’s wordplay and paranoia and, last but certainly not least, a sweeping history of theoretical physics. “The Passenger” is a stunning accomplishment: For McCarthy to publish a work of this scope and ambition at 89 is phenomenal. But it has a tragic flaw. Is it fatal?

One night, Bobby and his dive partner, Oiler, are sent to a small plane sunk deep in the Gulf and discover that the black box is missing. So is one of the passengers; the rest are, eerily, strapped in their submerged seats. When the crashed plane and its dead occupants fail to make the news, Bobby begins to worry they’ve seen something they shouldn’t have. He’s mildly interested in finding out about the missing passenger, but mostly he tries to lay low.

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Bobby moves into a rented room above a local bar that has seen a string of occupants meet untimely ends. Bobby doesn’t mind — handsome, intelligent and possessing a secret stash of dough, he appears to move above the concerns of his barfly cohort. Or maybe he likes to court danger: Before he came to New Orleans, he was a Formula Two race car driver. He rarely reveals what’s on his mind.

It takes his friend “Long John” Sheddan to tell us plainly: “He’s in love with his sister.” This is no spoiler; it’s only 30 pages in, and Sheddan lays it bare — a slightly mythologized version of the siblings’ relationship that hangs over the rest of this novel and also “ Stella Maris ,” McCarthy’s companion novel, a sort of coda that will be released Dec. 6. That volume consists solely of conversations between Bobby’s sister and her psychiatrist in a mental institution. She is introduced first in “The Passenger.” She’s the corpse on the first page, sometimes called Alice and sometimes Alicia, and she occupies alternating, italicized chapters.

Alicia is searingly brilliant at mathematics, ethereally beautiful and usually in conversation with a troupe of third-rate vaudevillian hallucinations. Alicia is obsessed with death and her older brother, as in love with him as he has been with her since she was an adolescent. She’s so smart that her discussion of theoretical math drives Bobby to drop it for physics, yet her romantic obsession with him drives her to suicide.

And we’ve gotten to the flaw. Perhaps it will not bother you as it bothers me. Must the core of this book be a love story between an older brother and his younger sister? Couldn’t a writer with McCarthy’s capacious imagination conceive of an adult, independent woman who could serve as an equally powerful lost love? I realize he’s been here before — his 1968 novel “Outer Dark” was about brother-sister incest — and of course any novelist can put anything he or she likes into fiction. But it is 2022. An older brother in love with his younger sister? It’s not tragic; it’s creepy.

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If we can ignore that for a moment — and take a look at the cover, maybe you can’t — the book follows Bobby around New Orleans, eating and drinking at still-standing classics including Tujague’s and the Old Absinthe House . He willfully ignores signals that something is wrong. A colleague dies in an underwater accident. His room is ransacked and his cat disappears. Two FBI-ish guys show up looking for him frequently — so frequently that they might instead be from the mafia or some more mysterious outfit.

McCarthy turns his substantial writerly gifts upon two distinct forces: the mechanical and the theoretical. He attends to the exquisite detail of Bobby’s physical world — the sounds and feel of an oil rig in a storm, the touch and clunk of a cigarette machine in a bar, the step-by-step process of removing a bathroom cabinet or digging up and carting off buried treasure. All the while, Bobby converses with friends who riff on time or men and women or Vietnam or failure, paragraphs and pages of disquisitions that can be funny and moving and dirty and insightful. Sometimes it feels a little like being trapped in a dorm hallway at 1 a.m. with a smart sophomore who is really, really stoned.

“You said once that a moment in time was a contradiction since there could be no moveless thing. That time could not be constricted into a brevity that contradicts its own definition,” Long John tells Bobby. “You also suggested that time might be incremental rather than linear. That the notion of the endlessly divisible in the world was attended by certain problems. While a discrete world on the other hand must raise the question as to what it is that connects it.” There are oodles of passages like this, so much to puzzle over for those who like to puzzle hard while reading their fiction.

As someone who hasn’t studied any higher math or physics, I didn’t always find a foothold in the theoretical arguments here. (I came closer to understanding this kind of math while reading Karen Olsson’s “The Weil Conjectures,” 2019.) In “The Passenger,” theoretical physics frequently comes across as a series of handoffs from one scientist to another, with entertainingly framed biographies about who proved the last guy wrong.

David Kipen’s Great American Novel: The works of Thomas Pynchon

Let’s make this a whole lot easier.

June 30, 2016

Many of the discussions of math and physics come from Alicia’s sections, both in “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris.” Her conversations with vaudeville hallucinations are unfortunately retro — the main guy, the Thalidomide Kid, has his disabilities played for laughs; two characters dress up as blackface minstrels. The Kid — a name McCarthy also used for his protagonist in 1985’s “Blood Meridian” — began appearing to Alice during adolescence and serves as a hectoring protector. His patter is full of malapropisms and wordplay (“we got lights and chimeras”) and his turn from annoying and obnoxious to ultimately sympathetic points again to McCarthy’s copious talent.

We see Alicia and Bobby each go to visit their beloved grandmother in Tennessee, asynchronously. Their father, a scientist, worked on the Manhattan Project and met their mother, a local Tennessee beauty, when she was working at the Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant that produced enriched uranium for the first atom bombs. The marriage didn’t last. And if you’re wondering if the sins of the father are being visited upon the Western siblings, you’re getting warm.

Bobby and Alicia’s narratives move side by side in a doomed spiral. Alicia is dead on Page 1, and Bobby’s choices narrow around him almost before he can save himself. He’s pushed from the comfort of New Orleans to a near-feral existence on the road — a journey rendered in prose that can’t be equaled. “In the morning he sat with his feet crossed under him and watched the sun rise. It sat swagged and red in the smoke like a matrix of molten iron swung wobbling up out of a furnace.” It’s Cormac McCarthy writing as only Cormac McCarthy can.

With its cast of ruffians, its American sins, its contemplation of quantum physics, its low life and high ideas, “The Passenger” is almost a perfect book. If only.

The Road: A Novel

BEFORE a morgue culture determined to hang a tag on every toe, Cormac McCarthy stands defiantly alive and untagged.

Sept. 24, 2006

Kellogg is a former books editor of The Times. She can be found on Twitter @paperhaus .

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Book review: The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is a writer who demands – even insists – on being read thoughtfully and thoroughly. I should begin this by being absolutely straight with you: The Passenger is a compelling read, but not an easy one.

This novel begins with wrong-footing and sleight of hand. We don’t actually begin with the male protagonist. Instead we are with a woman, and the Thalidomide Kid, with his “flipper hands”. He seems to be a cross between a therapist and a stage magician, and may not even be real. It has a classic McCarthy chilling line: “Any last words of advice for the living?” “Yes. Dont” (the absence of an apostrophe is not an error, but a stylistic choice throughout). The Kid refers to the woman by various different names, and makes bad puns about physicists like “Madam Curry”. “You dont know anything. You just make things up”. “Yeah”, he replies, “but some of it is pretty cool”. That might be a key to the whole novel. The Kid refers to Mister Bones, a reference to the bad conscience that crops up in John Berryman’s Dream Songs and is equally cruel. Berryman wrote, “People don't like him [the narrator, Henry], and he doesn't like himself. In fact, he doesn't even know what his name is... He also has a 'friend' who calls him Mr Bones, and I use friend in quotation marks because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived."

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After the opening disorientation of a chapter in italics, we are with Western . Over the course of the novel we learn that Western has been a Formula 2 racer and a physics undergraduate, but is currently a salvage diver. The plane wreck they are investigating throws up more questions than answers, particularly one missing passenger from a sealed, entombed, drowned vehicle. Soon after Western is being subtly harassed, then not so subtly. We also understand, from eavesdropping on his friends in the bar, that it is widely assumed he was in love with his own sister: who, of course, was schizophrenic, a genius and checked herself into a psychiatric institution. If Western has a catchphrase it might well be from Kakfa. “There is infinite amount of hope in the universe… just not for us.” Western is a clearly symbolic name, both in terms of genre and in terms of “manifest destiny.” Is, or was, everything inevitable? When we do find out the name of the woman, it is Alicia. So like Alice, in a kind of wonderland, just out of kilter. The link between salvage diving and psychiatric wards becomes clear. We are going into dark places.

Western is a classic McCarthy lead-figure. He is troubled, grieved, yearning for death but cursed with a persistent resilience. By far the best parts of the novel are his Beckett-like exchanges with a roué barfly, a drag artist, various people in menial jobs, a man in a care home and his slightly sinister lawyer. As he is told, “People are a f***ing puzzle. Did you know that?” His response is typically curt. “It might be the only thing I do know”. This is reiterated. “Well. You always were a puzzle. Which I’m sure you know. Are you a puzzle to yourself?” “Sure. Arent you?” These interlocuters are even more frightening than The Kid; one even says “if you’ve never contemplated killing a woman you’ve probably never been in love”. In some ways this is more horrible than the cannibalism and cooked infants in his previous novel, The Road.

When there are not long divagations on the difference between mathematics and physics, or theology, or grace, or conspiracy theories around Kennedy, there is a mordant humour. “I’d thought to give my body to science but obviously they draw the line somewhere… one might think cremation an option but there is a danger of the toxins taking out their scrubbers and leaving a swath of death and disease among dogs and children downwind for an unforeseeable distance”. Some of the technical details about kinds of cars, planes and ships might be a little too much, since knowing exactly the kind of car or ship or plane adds little emotional heft. The Passenger is, to coin a phrase, a pre-apocalyptic novel. “What do you pray for?” one character asked. “I dont pray for anything, I just pray”. “I thought you were an atheist”. “No. I dont have any religion”.

Many of the themes here – faith, technology, paranoia, melancholy, terror – are shared with two of the other great (male) contemporary American novelists, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. But if Pynchon deals with these matters in the form of a crazed scherzo and DeLillo unpicks it like a fugue, McCarthy has a lilting legato to his prose; usually quiet, sometimes unexpected. The word “gray” is seeded across the novel. I suppose that means there is no black or white in this ashen world.

This book will be followed by Stella Maris, published next month. We took the decision to review them separately, as it is quite the publishing event. In this book, we know that Stella Maris is the hospital where Alicia is. It means “star of the sea” and is used for the Virgin Mary. Diver, sea: surely a connection? The book is tantalising me, but I will make one prediction: I won’t solve McCarthy’s puzzle by the end of it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, £20

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The Passenger

Stella Maris

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “ among the bare gray poles of the winter trees .” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “ bit of color in the scrupulous desolation .” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in—a place she’s been before.

She’s a math prodigy, the daughter of a man who worked on the Manhattan Project, but she’s also been visited since the age of twelve by an apparition she calls the Thalidomide Kid, a restlessly pacing figure three feet tall and with flippers instead of hands, who to her is neither dream nor hallucination but “coherent in every detail.” The Kid often checks up on her, talking and teasing and goading, and knows her every thought and weakness. She understands that he’s not real, yet she also believes in his separate existence, a being “small and frail and brave…[and] ashamed” of his body’s spectacle. But he doesn’t visit her alone. Usually he brings some friends, the ones Alicia calls her “entertainers,” an old man in a “clawhammer” coat, say, or “ a matched pair of dwarves .” Her doctors have diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic, some of them think she’s autistic, and according to a personality test she is a “sociopathic deviant.” None of the labels fit.

Then there’s the body we don’t see, the one that should have been found in a private jet forty feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s 1980, and Alicia’s older brother Bobby—a Caltech dropout and onetime race car driver—works as a salvage diver out of New Orleans. He and his partner have been hired to investigate the crash. They cut the plane’s door open and then slowly swim inside, “the faces of the dead inches away,” their hair floating along with their coffee cups up toward the ceiling. Pilot and copilot plus seven passengers in suits, and it doesn’t take Bobby long to realize that there are a few things missing. No pilot’s flight bag, no black box, and the navigation panel has been pulled from the instrument board. Their firm will be paid with an untraceable money order, but later that day Bobby finds two men with badges outside his apartment. Seven passengers, they ask? Are you sure? Because the manifest shows eight, and the agents’ questions confirm his suspicions. The plane’s door latch may have been intact before his partner’s oxyarc torch sliced it open, but somebody else, somebody alive, has been in and out of that sunken jet before them.

We’ll never learn who that passenger was, or what brought the plane down. I’ll admit to some unsatisfied curiosity about that, but it didn’t take long to realize that neither Bobby nor I was going to get any answers. The missing passenger, the eighth man, is a MacGuffin, and he’s not the passenger the title refers to. Bobby is. The two words don’t share an etymology, but a passenger is essentially passive. A passenger gets borne along, not in control of the destination, not driving or steering or deciding. And Bobby’s driving days are done, though he still owns a Maserati and sometimes takes it on the road. They’ve been done ever since he crashed his Lotus in a Formula Two race and went into a coma—ever since he came out of it to find that his sister was dead.

Now he dives. The money is good and so is the adrenaline; as Alicia tells her shrink, Bobby was never afraid of heights or speed, but the depths, oh yes. So he dives and he drinks, a French Quarter life with no shape beyond the moment, until that plane goes down and he begins to wait for what will come. That’s when the surprises begin. The corpses grab you, but there’s much more here to hold you: a troubled family history on the one hand and a complicated, enveloping, exhilarating formal drama on the other.

So far I’ve presented McCarthy’s new work as if it were a single narrative, one that moves from Alicia’s death to Bobby’s present life, when those agents’ questions finally make him skip town to live off what wasn’t yet called the grid. McCarthy has, however, published two books this fall, The Passenger at the end of October and Stella Maris in early December, and some of the quotations above come from the latter, named after the psychiatric hospital where Alicia goes to die. The two books are as intimately related as, well, brother and sister. And as different too. They illuminate each other, and yet the relation between them is no easier to define than one between actual breathing people.

The Passenger is expansive, apparently plot-driven, yet also oddly and pleasurably digressive, full of Bobby’s conversations with friends, one of them a transsexual named Debussy Fields who headlines a drag show while saving up for her operation, and another a private detective with odd ideas about the Kennedys. Stella Maris is far more rigorously structured, and after its first page entirely in dialogue: transcripts of Alicia’s electrifying sessions with her last psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. The book doesn’t follow her out into the snow, but we always know that’s where she’s going; we can’t forget, even as we start, that she’s already been dead for almost four hundred pages.

I suppose you could read one without the other, The Passenger in particular. But I can’t imagine that anyone who finishes that book won’t want to go on. Each of them offers different bits of the family story, a detail in one making sense of a moment in the other, as though they were infiltrating each other. Alicia tells her psychiatrist all about the Kid, but the character himself appears only in The Passenger , in a series of italicized and grimly comic interchapters that break the flow of its central narrative. Stella Maris offers a fuller account of Bobby’s racing accident. After he’s spent a few months unconscious the doctors try to get Alicia to pull the plug; she refuses even though she doesn’t believe he’ll live. Each book allows for a more complete understanding of the other, just as meeting actual siblings can; they’ve been conceived in tandem and are semi-detached at most.

Still, I think you have to begin with The Passenger . It raises questions that Stella Maris helps us understand, and though that shorter volume doesn’t precisely answer them, reading it first would seem preemptive. Yet it is in no sense a sequel, and not just because Alicia’s final sessions take place before the other’s 1980s setting. In fact Stella Maris might even take precedence, the dominant partner in this codependent pair. McCarthy apparently delivered a draft of it eight years ago, while The Passenger was still in pieces, and an article in The New York Times notes that his publishers had a lively debate about just how to “package” the work. One volume or two? They’ve made the right choice. 1

Each book is stuffed with incidents and characters, but neither presents us with a linear history in which the present marches into the future. Instead the further you get the more you fall into the past, into a family chronicle assembled out of fragments, one that stretches back for generations. There’s a maternal grandmother still living outside of Knoxville, where McCarthy himself grew up; she’s mystified by the world her grandchildren inhabit, and puzzled even now by the accidents that got her daughter a World War II job at Oak Ridge. There’s the Princeton scientist who married her, a friend of Oppenheimer and Feynman, who refuses to feel guilty about Hiroshima. Los Alamos, a wrecked airplane in the Tennessee woods, Cremona violins, and the basement of Bobby’s other grandmother in Ohio, where he finds a fortune in gold. Alicia’s work in topology and her private theology predicated on number, singular. Names, lots of them, of great physicists and mathematicians, all of them real, along with some harrowing pages in which she describes what it would be like to drown yourself in Lake Tahoe, where the water is so cold that it’s “probably capable of keeping you alive for an unknown period of time. Hours perhaps, drowned or not,” as you slowly drop toward the bottom. Another diver’s memories of Vietnam, a seemingly abandoned oil rig, and then the fleabag rooms where Alicia waits for the relentlessly punning Kid; “ One more ,” he tells her, “ in a long history of unkempt premises …. The malady lingers on .”

Some of this appears in flashback. Bobby sits in New Orleans reading his sister’s letters and remembers a family funeral and his father’s boyhood house in Akron, the one with the gold. More of it comes in dialogue. Alicia has her entertainers and Bobby his comforters, the friends who pepper him with questions. The most important is John Sheddan, a con man who specializes in phony prescriptions. He says to Bobby that “your inner life is something of a hobby with me,” and also that “every conversation is about the past.” Every question attempts to uncover what nobody wants to say, and with the Western siblings there is just one issue on everybody’s mind. Sheddan tells a drinking buddy that Bobby is in love with his dead sister, and the Kid suggests that Alicia will kill herself because she doesn’t think he’ll ever wake up from his coma—that she can’t survive without the one person who makes her life even remotely bearable.

But there’s more. “We can do whatever we want,” Alicia tells Bobby in The Passenger , and he says in reply, “No…. We cant.” Faulkner’s Quentin Compson wants to sleep with his sister Caddy, to be forever together and alone with her in a place walled off by flames; he doesn’t ask her only because he’s afraid she’ll say yes. Here Alicia proposes it, believing that she and her brother are already all in all to each other, a world and a law sufficient unto themselves. Bobby believes it too, only he’s older and stops himself. That shared desire is present from the first pages of The Passenger , a sense of what must remain unspoken. Stella Maris does speak it, though, and makes it clear how much it has shaped their lives—a longing that stops just short of incest, a consummation that happens not on the page but in the relation between these two books instead.

None of this sounds much like McCarthy. If Bobby and Alicia trail a history behind them, then so does he. I don’t mean biographically—the history that matters here is that of his ten earlier novels, beginning with The Orchard Keeper (1965). He is now in his ninetieth year, and these new books, his first since the Pulitzer-winning The Road (2006), are in all likelihood his last. Yet while they are recognizably his, they don’t distill his earlier achievement, as late work so often does. They expand it. Oh, sure, the bodies; he always needs bodies. Knoxville, check, and the depiction of that city’s lowlife saloons in Suttree (1979) finds an answer in The Passenger ’s account of New Orleans. Incest: all right, a brother and a sister did figure in Outer Dark (1968), and it went a lot further than it does here.

But let me use that early novel to suggest how much his work has changed in the half-century since. McCarthy set that impressively creepy book in a Hobbesian wasteland. It’s clearly the American South, yet he never specifies the particular time or place of its action: a land marked not only by incest but also by infanticide, a disemboweling, and a lynch mob. Its narration is at once disjointed and entirely linear, its focus shifting constantly from one character to another but without allowing us a glimpse of their inner lives or attempting to define their motivations. Events succeed one another, and that is all, as if in this ruined world both thought and feeling were irrelevant.

And so it went, in book after book, with McCarthy’s characters remarkable for two things: an utter absence of interiority and also of any meaningful past. We learn nothing about Anton Chigurh, the dark star of No Country for Old Men (2005), except through the way he moves and acts and kills. Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) speaks enough for us to know that he believes that death is the way of the world and that the world belongs to those most willing to deal it out. Of his earlier life—of whatever forces made him—we learn only what the other characters say. We do, admittedly, know about John Grady Cole’s past in Cities of the Plain (1998), the last volume of what’s called the Border Trilogy, or at least we do if we’ve already read All the Pretty Horses (1992). Not that he thinks about it, for what matters is what he can do with a horse or a rope, the practical taciturn knowledge of hand and eye. He walks up to a horse “and leaned against her with his shoulder and lifted her foreleg between his knees and examined the hoof. He ran his thumb around the frog and he examined the hoof wall.” Yet we only know what he sees there because of what he does next, as though action reveals thought. Or rather supplants it.

Even in The Road McCarthy offers no more than a few sentences about its nameless characters’ earlier lives, the ones they had before disaster overtook their world. That vanished time has necessarily set this one in motion; it’s created the ashen land through which they march. But what counts is the ever-forward-rolling stone of now . That is an aesthetic decision, a statement about what matters in his pages; it is also, inevitably, an ethical choice.

The Passenger and Stella Maris are different, and a lot of the fun in reading them comes from watching McCarthy do something new. I can’t imagine a character in one of his earlier novels claiming that “every conversation is about the past.” It’s true that much of what we learn about the Westerns’ shared and separate histories, about the contours of their inner lives, comes not through a dramatized consciousness but in the form of conversation itself. Bobby sits with the detective Kline in Tujague’s on Decatur Street in New Orleans and watches as he

rocked the ice in his glass. You see yourself as a tragic figure. No I dont. Not even close. A tragic figure is a person of consequence. Which you are not. A person of ill consequence. Maybe. I know that sounds stupid. But the truth is I’ve failed everyone who ever came to me for help. Ever sought my friendship.

McCarthy has never used quotation marks or anything like the conventional “he said,” and sometimes one has to backtrack to see who’s talking. But speech forces both Bobby and Alicia into moments of introspection, and at times pushes them into memory. The spoken word becomes a synecdoche for the inner life, the unrepresented but always felt interiority that lies just off the page, and the narrative presence of the past becomes as one with consciousness itself. As to why these books are different, why McCarthy has decided to try something new, I can only speculate. I suspect it has to do with Alicia, that her central presence has made him change things. McCarthy’s women have usually been the weak part of his work. Neither The Road nor Blood Meridian has a single significant female character, and those in the Border Trilogy are little more than stereotypes. Only Rinthy Holme in Outer Dark has anything like a major role, but she doesn’t come up to Alicia’s imaginative weight, and he seems to have approached these new books with a sense of something earlier left undone. “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years,” he said in a 2009 interview, and though “I will never be competent enough to do so…at some point you have to try.” 2

Outer Dark sold badly; all McCarthy’s early novels did. Their violence probably cost him some readers, and so did his oddly principled aesthetic choices. But there was more. Flannery O’Connor famously said about writing in Faulkner’s shadow that “nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” McCarthy’s did stall, however, and in opening Outer Dark at random I find a description of an old woman “moving in an aura of faint musk, the dusty odor of aged female flesh impervious to dirt as stone is or clay.” Or as Faulkner put it at the start of Absalom, Absalom! , “the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity.” McCarthy took both the piled adjectives and the whiff of misogyny from his predecessor, and bits of plot as well, along with the sponsorship of Faulkner’s Random House editor, Albert Erskine.

Still, there’s something else going on in those early pages, something powerful. He plays none of the Mississippian’s restless liberating tricks with time and point of view, nor does he share Faulkner’s interest in the history of their region. But he’s far more relentless. His world seems starved of emotion, his characters’ lives unrelieved by any trace of laughter or generosity, of the fellow feeling and civil society that remain even in Faulkner’s darkest books. For some readers that’s an attraction.

McCarthy published steadily, but with few sales and a reluctance to teach he survived for years on foundation grants, including one of the first MacArthur “genius” awards. Many members of that inaugural 1981 group of fellows already had their major work behind them. In his case the foundation bet on the future of a man approaching fifty, and must at the start have wondered if its wager would pay off. McCarthy had moved from Tennessee to West Texas in 1976, and in writing about that new landscape he found a historical depth his earlier work had lacked. Blood Meridian , his fifth novel, appeared in 1985, and now stands high on that decade’s list of major American novels, matched only by White Noise and Beloved . But at the time? It wasn’t reviewed in these pages, and The New York Times buried its review on page 31 of the Sunday book section. Many who picked it up were repelled by its vivid, detailed insistence that violence is the essential condition of American life. It was one thing to encounter D.H. Lawrence’s claim, in Studies in Classic American Literature , that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” It was another to read a tale of the Old West in which a group of Anglo horsemen who have been hired to kill Apaches will scalp anyone they meet for the sake of the bounty.

Their leader puts his pistol to the head of an old woman and then tells one of his men to collect the “receipt,” turning the “dripping trophy…in the sun the way a man might qualify the pelt of an animal.” Qualify —that’s a good word, startling but exactly right, with the scalp worth $100. The horsemen ride on through the desert, they ride without destination or goal, and are held one day at dusk by the sight of a “distant city very white against the blue and shaded hills,” only to find a barren plain before them in the morning. They ride and they kill, moving across a “lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood,” killing not only because they can but because by now it’s the only thing they know how to do.

McCarthy’s language has all the richness of the King James Bible, its cadences slow and forever beautiful and forever at odds with the world it describes. It’s a vision of the American West a good bit more likely than anything John Ford ever put on the screen, but though the critical literature on it is now enormous, Blood Meridian sold fewer than 1,500 copies on its first publication. The announced initial printing for each of these new books is 300,000. Something has clearly happened in the meantime.

Or rather two things, not counting Oprah, and the movies, and the prizes—two things internal to the work itself. The first was that McCarthy burned not just the Faulknerese but almost all of the grandiloquence out of his prose, or at least grandiloquence as conventionally defined. Blood Meridian is a jewel-studded crown. Its every phrase seems inevitable, and the tools of its making are wholly at his command.

Afterward McCarthy found a new cadence, and from All the Pretty Horses on his language began to recall Hemingway’s. His rhythms remained biblical, but his sentences became seamless and spare, the burrs rubbed off their smoothly machined surfaces. He had never liked semicolons, but in his later work even commas are rare, and complex sentences almost nonexistent. Instead he typically ties a series of independent clauses together, many of them short: “The day was warm and they washed out their shirts and put them on wet and mounted up and rode on.” Sometimes there’s an inventory, the “burros three or four in tandem atotter with loads of candelilla or furs or goathides or coils of handmade rope fashioned out of lechugilla or the fermented drink called sotol,” but his attention is almost always on the processes of men at work, in which one thing cannot help but follow another. This prose is terse, and mannered, and in its way as extravagant as anything he had written before, with an almost ostentatious absence of ornament. Yet its register summoned not only Hemingway but also the hard-boiled world of a great deal of American popular fiction, and All the Pretty Horses became his first best seller.

The second thing was even more radical. I don’t think McCarthy has ever changed his punishing view of human life. He is Hobbesian still, with the world a war of all against all, and as the judge says in Blood Meridian , “It makes no difference what men think of war…. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone.” Life falls on a flip of a coin, but the killer always calls it and the toss is always rigged. Yet after Blood Meridian McCarthy began to imagine a series of sympathetic protagonists, not just the diverting, loquacious barflies of Suttree but figures whose probity makes them admirable. They are the exceptions in their society, the figures by whom we judge it: John Grady Cole and Billy Parham in the Border Trilogy, the sheriff in No Country for Old Men , the father and the son in The Road , carrying the flame of what they hope will be a future. They give the reader something to hold on to, and yet in doing so they also underline the odd purity of Blood Meridian , in which belief and nihilism are as one. That book wasn’t something McCarthy needed to repeat, but its current critical standing paradoxically rests on and maybe required the commercial success of his later and apparently easier books.

Alicia Western has always known that some malign force lies beyond our customary existence, has sensed a presence to which the rest of us are numb. As a child she caught a glimpse of terror itself, and the Thalidomide Kid claims that’s why she’s so troubled; anyone who had seen such a thing would be troubled, though so would anyone capable of imagining it:

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think I remember a young girl on tiptoes peering through a high aperture infrequently reported upon in the archives. What did she see? A figure at the gate? But that aint the question, is it? The question is did it see her?

Would the world’s evil even bother to take account of such a small and curious being? Of course it would; Judge Holden has his string of tiny victims, after all. The Kid’s words come at the very start of The Passenger , and when I first read them they seemed just a bit of nattering, part of his deliberately annoying spray of words. Nothing here is inconsequential, however, and Alicia comes back to the idea in Stella Maris . She tells her shrink that she once had a waking dream that “was neither waking nor a dream,” a glimpse of an unknown realm “where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me.” All our longing for shelter and community is but an attempt to “elude this baleful thing” of which we walk in fear and yet of which we can have no direct knowledge. Those sentinels pushed her back, away from what no one should see, but though she found the gate just once, that doesn’t mean her vision was false. She’s even given that force a name: the Archatron, a Lovecraftian word of McCarthy’s own coinage. 3

That sense of a malign but impersonal force at work in the world makes the fact that Alicia’s father worked on the Manhattan Project into something more than backstory; he was present at the Trinity site, when in the light of a thousand suns Oppenheimer thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The Judge himself could not have put it better, and by now Alicia has an idea about just how the Archatron works and where its wickedness comes from. “I think you have to have language to have craziness,” she tells Dr. Cohen, and adds that the “arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system.” Because language is useful it spread like an epidemic into every pocket of early human life, and at its heart was the idea that one thing could represent another. But it “evolved from no known need,” and its enormous disruptive power was “of a piece with its value. Creative destruction. All sorts of talents and skills must have been lost…[replacing] at least part of the world with what can be said about it.”

McCarthy took these ideas for a spin in a brief 2017 essay, after completing a draft of Stella Maris . 4 There’s little doubt that Alicia speaks for him here, that her bleakness is his. Language is a Manichaean force, it both makes and destroys us, and wherever it comes from, the fact that we’ve learned it is a far from fortunate fall. The essay appeared in the science magazine Nautilus , and its argument grows out of McCarthy’s conversations with the fellows of the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary think tank with which he has long been associated. He almost never grants interviews, but whenever he does he notes the provocations and pleasures of talking with the institute’s physicists and mathematicians.

Alicia Western is inconceivable without those talks. Or no: what comes from them are the details of the things she says, the theories and the names, her belief that mathematics is “just sweat and toil” and yet also “a faith-based initiative.” But the ideas in Stella Maris are exciting because they’re hers , because they’re embedded in the drama and the struggle of her life. She appears to discover them as she speaks, thinking aloud while Dr. Cohen tries to follow. They are statements about the self, and they snap on the page even though—or precisely because—they won’t be enough to save her. The same ideas in McCarthy’s own essayistic voice are inert by comparison, the product and not the process of thought.

No long and intricate work of fiction is perfect. The Passenger could be tighter. McCarthy’s dialogue is always propulsive, and yet some of Bobby’s Louisiana encounters serve no real narrative purpose; they’re engaging in the moment, but that’s all. I’m uncertain, moreover, about the thematic necessity of the incest, the threatened or promised or balked desire between brother and sister. It does amp up their emotional bond; it explains why Alicia’s belief that Bobby won’t come out of his coma is what pushes her over, why too he remains a passenger in his own life. Yet aren’t some nonsexual bonds between siblings so tight that their loss can lead to despair? Perhaps that’s just my own squeamishness. That’s what Alicia herself would argue, and in reading it’s hard to dismiss her. Because I believe in that love. I believe it’s true of these particular characters; I believe it when she says that “the fact that it wasnt acceptable wasnt really our problem.”

When the men with badges start getting troublesome, Bobby decides he should hide his sister’s letters. Even the safe-deposit box where he keeps them might not be safe enough. He’s read them so often that he knows them by heart—all but the last one, the one he’s never opened. We’re not told much about it, but in The Passenger ’s opening pages the Kid asks Alicia if she’s going to leave a note, and she tells him that she’s “ writing my brother a letter ,” one addressed to a man she believed was already as good as dead. She was dead herself by the time Bobby came out of his coma, and when he visits her Wisconsin hospital nobody will tell him the details of her last days. There’s certainly no Dr. Cohen to talk to, and Bobby never learns as much about her death as we do. At the end of The Passenger he hands the letter to his friend Debussy and asks her to read it for him. He leaves the room while she does, and when he returns her eyes are brimming. But he can’t make himself ask her what it says.

This isn’t the first time a novelist has used an unopened envelope as an emblem for the mystery of another person’s heart, and I doubt it will be the last. Nevertheless I felt like crying myself as I approached the end of Stella Maris , the end of this dark enthralling pair. Alicia’s sessions with her psychiatrist grow shorter and more ragged, and Dr. Cohen starts to note what the book’s form won’t allow us to see, the details of her physical appearance, so thin and worn and tearful. She can no longer resist what she runs toward, and each sentence brings her closer to the December day on which we first saw her frozen body. On the last page Dr. Cohen tells her that their time is up, without quite understanding that it’s really her own time that’s up, and ours too in a way. I know, she says:

Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.

December 22, 2022

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Alexandra Alter, “Sixteen Years After The Road , Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels,” The New York Times , March 8, 2022.  ↩

John Jurgensen, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy,” The Wall Street Journal , November 20, 2009.   ↩

McCarthy first used the word in Cities of the Plain , as part of a dream vision of human sacrifice.   ↩

“The Kekulé Problem,” Nautilus , April 17, 2017.  ↩

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The Grim Return of Cormac McCarthy

At 89, mccarthy is publishing two new novels, confused and confusing, arguing that life is brutal and meaningless. why.

In Lily King’s novel Writers & Lovers , the narrator is asked, during an interview for a teaching job, what she thinks of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and she makes the mistake of being scrupulously honest. She replies that she “couldn’t get past the writing to enjoy the story, that he seemed to be alternating between imitating Hemingway and imitating Faulkner.” This response dismays her potential co-worker, but for much of the 1980s and 1990s, while McCarthy was building his reputation as the bard of American masculinity, many readers felt the same way. McCarthy’s late-life masterworks, 2005’s No Country for Old Men and 2006’s The Road , subverted this critique by harnessing and even subduing McCarthy’s oracular nihilism to no-nonsense genre-fiction plots. They also made him significantly more popular— The Road was even an Oprah’s Book Club pick —and were the subjects of ambitious Hollywood adaptations, one of which (2007’s No Country for Old Men ) won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Now, with the publication of two new, linked McCarthy novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , it’s time to dust off that caveat again. At first, The Passenger , published this week, seems poised to deliver a similarly transformative variation on the thriller, but it is not to be. Stella Maris , publishing in December, doesn’t even try. And while the Hemingway strain in McCarthy remains as evident as ever, Faulkner takes a back seat to more unlikely influences ranging from Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon to, weirdly, James Ellroy and even less reputable compatriots.

The Faulknerian touch mostly manifests in the central characters of the two novels, siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, who, in addition to having a flagrantly thematic last name, are also the children of a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and who never suffered a moment of troubled conscience over it. Instead, it’s his offspring who seem haunted by his apocalyptic guilt and, more tormentingly, by their incestuous love for each other, never consummated. The Passenger describes a series of events and encounters in Bobby’s life during the 1980s, while Stella Maris is a transcript of Alicia’s sessions with a psychiatrist in a sanitarium, shortly before she killed herself. During her interviews with the shrink, Alicia believes Bobby to be brain-dead following an accident in the course of his work as a Formula 2 race car driver in Italy. Partway through Stella Maris, it occurred to me that the events in The Passenger might be nothing more than the hallucinations or dreams of a comatose Bobby, which would explain a lot. Ultimately, however, it proved as impossible to reach a conclusion on this question as it is to come to any firm understanding of the novels overall.

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This isn’t to say that the two books—particularly The Passenger —lack indelible passages. Early in The Passenger , Bobby, living in New Orleans and working as a salvage diver, is part of a team hired to search a small plane that went into the sea off the Mississippi coast. They are told to look for survivors, an improbability they shrug off, but other things about the wreck seem unusual. McCarthy’s description of the divers silently making their way through a fuselage full of still strapped-in corpses is transfixing:

He kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away. Everything that could float was against the ceiling. Pencils, cushions, styrofoam coffeecups. Sheets of paper with the ink draining off into hieroglyphic smears.

In the cockpit, Bobby finds the co-pilot still belted to his seat but the pilot “hovering overhead against the ceiling, with his arms and legs hanging down like an enormous marionette.” Also, the black box is gone. Also, the plane seems completely undamaged. Back on the surface, Bobby and his buddy Oiler figure that someone has been to the wreck before them. “I’ll tell you what else,” Oiler says when Bobby presses him to discuss all this, “my desire to remain totally fucking ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I’m going to say that it is just damn near a religion.” Bobby, being a Cormac McCarthy protagonist, has no use for religion and pursues the mystery for a bit. Then men with badges turn up to question him, explaining that there was one less body on the plane than there should have been. A passenger is missing. Bobby’s apartment gets tossed, then the rented room he decamps to gets tossed. Oiler is killed while working a job in South America.

The McCarthy of the 2000s might have stuck with this terrific premise and hung one of his bleak, relentless parables on its thriller skeleton. Later, Bobby takes a job on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, dropped off by a helicopter just before the arrival of a ferocious storm. The crew is nowhere to be found. He wanders through deserted steel corridors as the wind roars outside, eating apricots out of a can and becoming increasingly convinced that someone else is there too, just out of sight. And then there are his father’s papers, compiled or collected while the old man was holed up a cabin in the Sierra Nevada, then stolen in a peculiar burglary in which nothing of conventional value was taken. It’s never quite clear what the men in suits want from Bobby, who eventually winds up on the lam from the IRS as well. Is it to do with the wreck or nuclear secrets or what?

McCarthy pointedly never develops any of these episodes into a story. Instead, Bobby has extensive conversations about machinery with other men; extracts a long account of a friend’s harrowing experiences in the Vietnam War; buys dinner for a transgender woman with whom he enjoys a courtly platonic friendship; visits his grandmother in Tennessee, where she still mourns the ancestral family home, submerged under an artificial lake in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project. He favors a researcher with a lengthy assessment of the major figures of quantum mechanics and string theory. He listens to a private detective’s explanation of how the Mafia was behind the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy (that’s the James Ellroy part). He hides out in an off-the-grid Idaho farmhouse for a frigid winter. Eventually he winds up living in a windmill on an island near Ibiza.

If this sounds random, it is, despite the recurring motifs of deep water, conspiracy, trauma, and the sins of fathers visited upon their children. Interspersed with Bobby’s adventures are chapters in which Alicia banters with the hallucinations induced by her apparent schizophrenia. These are led by a figure called the Thalidomide Kid, a wise-cracking dwarf with flippers instead of hands who, when not haranguing her with puns, organizes a series of phantasmal vaudeville acts for Alicia’s dubious benefit. These interludes recall the most tiresome parts of Thomas Pynchon novels, all bad jokes and stupid music hall songs. Stella Maris will recast the Kid as trying to save Alicia, but although he doesn’t resemble any recognizable symptom of mental illness, I can see why his visits would make her to want to kill herself.

The argument that life is one damn thing after another until you die is a solid one, and that indeed may be the point of Bobby’s pointless story. Stella Maris provides the philosophical underpinnings of this idea, although in Alicia’s view the human portion of the universe is not merely random: It is demonstrably getting worse and worse, with the atrocities made possible by her father’s work serving as Exhibit A. On a personal level, the tragedy of Alicia’s life is that the one thing she wanted—to marry Bobby and bear his child—has been denied because of a taboo that means nothing to her. While Bobby hangs out with a bunch of colorful French Quarter lowlifes who seem unfazed by his incestuous longing (they just think it’s a shame to waste your life on grief), Alicia takes a while to reveal her secret to her interlocutor, who is appropriately shocked. Most of their conversation, however, has to do with theoretical mathematics and its role in Alicia’s life.

Like most readers of this book, I have little understanding of the ideas Alicia discusses, but from what I can discern, she seems to be a devastated Platonist. She admires the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, who succumbed to paranoia-induced starvation in 1978. Gödel believed that mathematical abstractions had a real existence transcending the material world. For Alicia, a mathematical genius who graduated from the University of Chicago at the age of 16, this idea is a trap. She seems unable to stop at mathematics and is tormented by the idea that evil, as well, must have some transcendent reality, poisoning the world and causing her to wish not just that she was dead, but that she had never existed in the first place. In one of the most vivid passages in Stella Maris, she explains why she changed her mind about drowning herself in a lake only after realizing in detail exactly how physically agonizing the experience would be.

The Passenger

By Cormac McCarthy. Knopf.

Stella Maris

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McCarthy isn’t known for his convincing female characters. Alicia is no exception, but he’s conceived of her as so intellectually freakish that it hardly matters. At the heart of her suicidal impulses is a memory of a “waking dream” she experienced at the age of 11. In this vision, she peered through a peephole to see sentinels standing at a gate beyond which, she sensed, lay a malevolent presence. She knew then that “the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge.” Alicia calls this presence the Archatron, an invented word that appears in another dream description in McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. This force appears to be something ancient but also increasingly manifested in the present, and responsible for the “grim eruptions of this century.” It is “an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world” and “a deep and eternal demonium” at the “core of reality.”

Never has McCarthy sounded more like H.P. Lovecraft, whose extravagant hopelessness is forever tipping over into camp. McCarthy’s fiction, too, sometimes threatens to become a parody of itself. At its best, it counters his nihilistic tendencies with the sheer thrill of narrative, arguing, in its way, that a sleek, relentless story, gorgeously told, offers pleasures enough for this world. These confusing, confused late-life novels don’t do that. Instead they’re overtaken by dissolution. McCarthy is 89. If he has really come to believe that our existence is utterly brutal and meaningless, why bother to write about it at all?

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Review: Cormac McCarthy returns with cryptic ’The Passenger’

This combination of images released by Knopf shows cover art for companion novels “The Passenger,” left, and “Stella Maris” by Cormac McCarthy. (Knopf via AP)

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“The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)

It’s been 16 years since Cormac McCarthy released “The Road” and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, cementing his reputation as a master American novelist. Plenty of time, then, to write two books for fans to savor in 2022.

The first, “The Passenger,” is out now, and while it has that traditional McCarthy style (spare prose, few commas and adjectives, scant apostrophes, and no quotation marks to tell you who’s talking), it is nothing if not original. It’s difficult to summarize the plot, but the protagonist is a guy with a great name, Bobby Western. The novel begins in Mississippi in 1980 as Bobby, working as a salvage diver, sits on a Coast Guard boat about to explore the wreckage of a plane crash below the surface. We learn there’s a passenger from the manifest whose body is not on board and the black box is missing. But this is definitely not a mystery novel. If you turn the pages hoping for answers, you won’t find them.

What you will find are deep discussions about quantum mechanics, God, the atomic bomb, who killed JFK, and of course, love. We learn Bobby’s younger sister, Alicia, was a child mathematics prodigy, who while studying for her doctorate at the University of Chicago years ago, committed herself to a mental hospital named Stella Maris in Wisconsin before killing herself. (“Stella Maris” is also the name of the companion novel to be published on Dec. 6.) We learn their father and mother both worked on the Manhattan Project, Dad as one of the scientists with Oppenheimer as they watched the first mushroom cloud fill the sky in the New Mexico desert. Oh, and we learn the siblings loved each other. Incestuously? Unclear. But it certainly haunts them both. Alicia is a diagnosed schizophrenic, visited by various “chimeras.” She dubs the ringleader the “Thalidomide Kid.” He’s small in stature and with flippers instead of hands. She merits her own chapters, all in italics, during which she converses with those hallucinations.

If that all sounds like a lot, you’re right. This is not an easy beach read. It’s difficult to follow at times, in part because the secondary characters are barely introduced. Someone is looking for Bobby — because of the plane crash? Because of his parentage? — and he avoids detection by wandering through the South talking philosophy and cars and nuclear annihilation with people from his past and present as we stitch together his story. Reading “Stella Maris” later this year will help some. Taking the form of transcripts between Alicia and her doctor, it’s formatted as a series of interviews with the patient, set eight years before the events of “The Passenger.” But Alicia is not just any patient. Like her brother, she thinks deeply about everything and shares it all with Dr. Robert Cohen. The only thing she won’t delve into too deeply? Bobby.

At 89, McCarthy still has plenty to say. Both these books ruminate on consciousness, what it truly means to be alive, and whether there are universal truths that govern the world. And while it’s fair to not expect answers to questions so big, some readers will wonder why the stories have to be so cryptic.

Posted on 30 Mar 2023 in Fiction |

CORMAC MCCARTHY The Passenger. Reviewed by Michael Jongen

Tags: Cormac McCarthy / Louisiana / Mississippi River / Stella Maris / US writers

The new novel from this iconic writer embraces conspiracies, hallucinations and paranoia in America’s South.

The Passenger is an ambitious novel; it is also a little crazy. I was by turns gripped, maddened, bored and intrigued. It is a novel about paranoia and obsession and written in a dense style where language is seemingly more important than plot development.

Bobby Western is a deep-sea diver and his story begins in 1980 when he and a friend plunge into the depths of the Mississippi to find a ten-seater plane. There are nine bodies in the plane, but the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box and the tenth passenger are missing. From this point Western’s life begins to unravel.

This novel is not a conventional mystery and there will be no satisfying resolution of the plot for the reader. Rather, we are drawn into the strangeness of Bobby’s world and his past – not least that he is the son of an inventor of the nuclear bomb – and he also carries guilt over the suicide of his sister, for whom he may have had incestuous feelings.

From the moment he returns from the dive, Bobby’s life is under threat as mysterious law officers arrive to interrogate him about what he may have found on the wreck. He moves lodgings and checks into a hotel that is a little like the Hotel California. He runs into characters from his past, who all seem to know about his predicament.

There were two men standing outside his door. He stopped. If they could get inside the gate then they could get inside his apartment. Then he realised they had been inside his apartment. Mr Western? Yes. I wonder if we could have a word with you? Who are you? They reached into their coat pockets and produced leather fobs with badges and put them away again. Maybe we could go in and talk for a minute. Vault the gate. Run away. Mr Western? Sure. Okay.

Western takes another job diving on an abandoned oil rig off the Louisiana coast. Oiler, his co-worker on the previous job, drowns, and Western knows he is in trouble. He hires a lawyer who makes him aware that he cannot run away from his problems.

Side by side in italicised chapters, the story – and fantasies – of his sister Alicia unfold. I found these at times incomprehensible, but gradually some cohesion forms. Bobby seeks to make sense of his past in order to secure his future. This may be the time to mention that McCarthy has also published a companion volume, Stella Maris . This takes the form of Alicia being interviewed by a psychiatrist in the institution where she resides. The psych tries to make sense of the fantasies she recounts in The Passenger and her relationship with her brother and the guilt over their father’s life. I am not confident that reading Stella Maris will make the story of The Passenger any clearer but it may be of interest.

The pivotal point in The Passenger comes when ‘The Kid’, a figure from Alicia’s dreams, visits Western at his lowest point. HIs bank accounts have been seized and he has no money and no options. The Kid helps him realise that he needs to unfold his sister’s mystery and access her possessions in order to move on.

He was much as she’d described him. The hairless skull corraded with the scars perhaps come by at his unimaginable creation. The funny oarlike shoes he wore. His seal’s flippers splayed on the arms of the chair. Are you alone? said Western Jesus, Jonathan. Yeah. I’m alone. Can’t stay long. I’m just sort of playing hooky, actually. You weren’t sent here to see me. Nope. Come on me own hook. I was going through my calendar and the date caught my eye. It’s come and gone before. True enough. Why are you here? Just thought I’d see how you were doing.

On his quest Bobby has the assistance of friends on the fringe of society. Josie, the desk clerk at his dive hotel, keeps him informed of the comings and goings of others in the hotel and the various anonymous law enforcement figures. Debussy, a drag artist, is in love with Bobby and helps him by reading his sister’s letters and interpreting them. Sheddan, a barfly, is fully aware of Bobby’s past and lost potential as well as his troubled relationship with his family. Then there is Kline, his lawyer, who seemingly knows more about Bobby’s dilemma than Bobby himself. He encourages Bobby to leave town, adopt a new identity and lose himself. These characters are rich and Dickensian, popping up with amazing and coincidental regularity.

Within this sprawling novel McCarthy covers similar terrain to many of the great American writers, including the Vietnam War and the assassination of President Kennedy. Does the plane wreck have a connection to the Kennedys and their links with the Mafia? McCarthy will make you wonder, as have writers such as James Ellroy before him.

… Basically [Bobby] Kennedy was a moralist. Before long he was to have an amazing roster of enemies and he prided himself on knowing who they were and what they were up to. Which he didn’t of course. By the time his brother was shot a couple of years later they were mired up in a concatenation of plots and schemes that will never be sorted out. At the head of the list was killing Castro and if that failed actually invading Cuba. In the end I don’t think that would have happened but it’s a sort of bellwether for all the trouble they were in. I always wondered if there might not have been a moment there when Kennedy realized he was dying that he didn’t smile with relief.

It would take a reader with much more patience than me to decode this novel and make sense of the connections. I sat back and enjoyed the ride and it was surreal. McCarthy writes beautiful sentences and plumbs the depths of paranoia. He explores psychiatry, philosophy and physics with a deft touch. This is a novel which explores the big issues within a distinctly masculine working-class ethos and a specific cultural period in the United States. It is a book that demands to be re-read, and I will continue to dwell on its meaning.

Cormac McCarthy The Passenger Picador 2022 HB 400pp $45.00

Michael Jongen is a librarian who tweets as @michael_jongen

You can buy  The Passenger  from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia .

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