the passenger book review

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Book Reviews

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

Gabino Iglesias

Covers of Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris.

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 .

The Incandescent Wisdom of Cormac McCarthy

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

black-and-white sketch of Cormac McCarthy's face looking to one side with inset image of two people embracing in waves

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.”

Explore the January/February 2023 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

About the Author

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

Share your opinion of this book

More by Cormac McCarthy

BOOK REVIEW

by Cormac McCarthy

More About This Book

11 Buzzy Fiction Books Coming Our Way This Fall

PERSPECTIVES

Early Interviews With Cormac McCarthy Rediscovered

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

More by Colleen Hoover

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

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

Bill Gates Shares His 2024 Summer Reading List

Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

Entertainment

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.

Read More: The 33 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022

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.

More Must-Reads from TIME

The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024
Inside the Rise of Bitcoin-Powered Pools and Bathhouses
How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador
What Makes a Friendship Last Forever?
Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
Your Questions About Early Voting , Answered
Column: Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody
The 32 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

‘Bobby Western asks: ‘You ever bump into something down there that you didn’t know what it was?’

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.

after newsletter promotion

Picador The Passenger: Cormac McCarthy Hardcover – 25 Oct. 2022

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.

Cormac McCarthy
Book of the day

The Best Fiction Books » New Literary Fiction

The passenger, by cormac mccarthy, recommendations from our site.

“The literary event of the season must surely be the publication of Cormac McCarthy’s first new books since the devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic The Road in 2006. McCarthy returns now with not one, but two linked novels, which together tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by family history—their physicist father helped invent the atom bomb. In The Passenger , salvage diver Bobby stumbles upon a murder mystery while exploring a submerged plane wreck.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022

Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

Other books by Cormac McCarthy

Blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, the road by cormac mccarthy, stella maris by cormac mccarthy, the passenger & stella maris by cormac mccarthy, child of god by cormac mccarthy, our most recommended books, treacle walker by alan garner, a shining by jon fosse, translated by damion searls, yoga by emmanuel carrère, until august: a novel by gabriel garcía márquez, the seven moons of maali almeida by shehan karunatilaka, my work by olga ravn, translated by sophia hersi smith & jennifer russell.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

Bookreporter
ReadingGroupGuides
AuthorsOnTheWeb

The Book Report Network

Regular Features

Author spotlights, "bookreporter talks to" videos & podcasts, "bookaccino live: a lively talk about books", favorite monthly lists & picks, seasonal features, book festivals, sports features, bookshelves.

Coming Soon

Newsletters

Weekly Update
On Sale This Week

Fall Reading

Summer Reading
Spring Preview
Winter Reading
Holiday Cheer

Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the passenger.

» Click here to read Joe Hartlaub's review of STELLA MARIS, the second volume in The Passenger series.

Let us start with some of the backstory of THE PASSENGER. Cormac McCarthy’s last novel, THE ROAD, was published in 2006. Many readers at that time wondered what would be next for him. Rumors followed intermittently. News finally trickled out that McCarthy was working on a new novel about mathematics. A page was up on Amazon shortly thereafter, offering the book for presale, but it quickly vanished. There was no further word other than expressions of yearning and wistfulness about its failure to appear.

That is, until March 8, 2022, when Knopf, McCarthy’s longtime and extremely patient publisher, announced that THE PASSENGER would release on October 25, 2022, while a second book (described elsewhere as a sequel/prequel/coda) titled STELLA MARIS would follow. The first part of that promise is now fulfilled, and it is everything one might have hoped for. THE PASSENGER is worthy of becoming your favorite new literary drug, a multifaceted jewel of a book that will keep you up all night reading and thinking.

"THE PASSENGER is worthy of becoming your favorite new literary drug, a multifaceted jewel of a book that will keep you up all night reading and thinking."

The novel has been described by biologist David Krakauer as “McCarthy 3.0.” Just so. McCarthy certainly brings his familiar and unique stylistic form to THE PASSENGER, including a lack of quotation marks, the rareness of attribution, incomparable descriptions and extended conversations that plumb the personality essence of each compelling principal character. But the book is quite different topically from what he has previously written for the masses. Here, he emphasizes analysis and science to a greater degree than is normally found in modern literature. What is missing is the violence of his other novels, though the attendant sorrow of the human experience is present.

The narrative alternates in point of view between siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, who also are would-be lovers. We meet Alicia in 1973, the year of her death. She shares her occasional spotlight in acerbic conversations with a gentleman she calls the Thalidomide Kid, who in turn is accompanied by a bizarre and revolving cast of hangers-on. Alicia possesses an extremely high-order intelligence when it comes to mathematics and an interest to match, to the extent that it leaves her virtually no time for other concerns. The Kid makes his appearances wherever Alicia happens to be. He locates her with such skill that it seems clear he actually exists only in her imagination, though one can never be sure, even as they goad each other at length.

However, THE PASSENGER belongs primarily to Bobby, a diver in the middle of a salvage operation in 1980 near Pass Christian, Mississippi, where he is tasked with investigating the reported crash of a passenger plane in the Gulf of Mexico. He locates the submerged but otherwise undamaged jet easily enough, as well as more than a reasonable share of enigmas of the locked door mystery type. These include the seemingly impossible absences of the pilot’s flight bag, the black box and a passenger.

Bobby’s discovery causes him many problems in his hometown of New Orleans. He is barely dried off from the dive before mysterious strangers appear and begin questioning him about what he found. That would be bad enough, but they also launch an investigation into his sparse, deceptively simple life. Bobby has a wide and deep field of knowledge, particularly in physics, but he does not have the answers to the questions being asked of him.

Things start to unravel for Bobby in the gradual then sudden way that Ernest Hemingway described the acceleration of bankruptcy. His troubles also begin to dramatically affect his quirky and memorable friends, acquaintances and associates. The situation prompts him to retain a shadowy private investigator who has some potential solutions to his increasingly severe difficulties, though they are not the answers he wants. Ultimately, though, they are just what he needs. Perhaps. When and if Bobby starts will be his salvation, if he does not wait too long.

Some parts of THE PASSENGER can be rough sledding. McCarthy occasionally drops information into the dialogue that includes words and phrases familiar to mathematicians and physicists but most likely are unknown to the general public. Thankfully, the scientific discussions never bog down the narrative. The obscure terms are for the most part amenable to comprehension (at least minimally) with a few moments of research.

Please note that McCarthy is not showing off here. The multiple exposures to the pure scientific concepts found within these pages hint at a deeper story that enhances the primary one being presented. There is also plenty of grim laugh-out-loud humor scattered in the tales of war, death and love. McCarthy attempts and succeeds in covering all the bases of human activity while skipping lightly across the mystery, science fiction, thriller and even romance genres, though he does not linger too long in those kingdoms. Instead it carves out its own unassailable fiefdom.

So what is left for McCarthy to tell in STELLA MARIS? Alicia gets her own star turn in that book, which releases on December 6th. Perhaps it will answer some of the questions that are posed at the conclusion of THE PASSENGER…but then again, it may raise even more. In either case, the first volume of this major work is required and unforgettable reading that will make you even more impatient to encounter its companion.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on October 26, 2022

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Publication Date: September 26, 2023
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN-10: 030738909X
ISBN-13: 9780307389091

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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.”

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

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.

Aerial view of place setting labeled with all hazards parents may see.

Link copied

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. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

They thought that they’d found the perfect apartment. They weren’t alone .

The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization .

What happened to the whale from “Free Willy.”

It was one of the oldest buildings left downtown. Why not try to save it ?

The religious right’s leading ghostwriter .

After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served .

A comic strip by Alison Bechdel: the seven-minute semi-sadistic workout .

Election 2024
Entertainment
Newsletters
Photography
AP Buyline Personal Finance
AP Buyline Shopping
Press Releases
Israel-Hamas War
Russia-Ukraine War
Global elections
Asia Pacific
Latin America
Middle East
Election results
Google trends
AP & Elections
U.S. Open Tennis
Paralympic Games
College football
Auto Racing
Movie reviews
Book reviews
Financial Markets
Business Highlights
Financial wellness
Artificial Intelligence
Social Media

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)

Copy Link copied

“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.

We need your support today

Independent journalism is more important than ever. Vox is here to explain this unprecedented election cycle and help you understand the larger stakes. We will break down where the candidates stand on major issues, from economic policy to immigration, foreign policy, criminal justice, and abortion. We’ll answer your biggest questions, and we’ll explain what matters — and why. This timely and essential task, however, is expensive to produce.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels are deliberately frustrating

The Passenger is out now, and Stella Maris is out in December. They’re McCarthy’s first new books since 2006.

by Constance Grady

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Both book covers next to each other. The covers are reverse images of each other.

It’s been 16 years since Cormac McCarthy published his apocalyptic masterpiece The Road , won the Pulitzer, and then, having secured his place in literary history, apparently vanished into the mists. Now, at 89 years old, he’s returned with two new books: The Passenger , out now, and its companion novella Stella Maris , out in December. Together they form less a capstone to McCarthy’s storied career than they do a compelling if uneven coda.

Some of McCarthy’s most celebrated novels are page-turners, but that’s not on the agenda here. These books are built to stand apart from the reader, to withhold, to refuse to satisfy. You can almost feel McCarthy swaggering a bit as, with great skill and elegance, he chooses time and time again to frustrate any desire the reader might have for either narrative or story.

The Passenger and Stella Maris occur 10 years apart from one another, each told by a different sibling. The Passenger takes place in the 1980s and is narrated by Bobby Western, a taciturn tough guy who was once a race driver, is currently a salvage diver, and maintains a deep knowledge of theoretical physics. Stella Maris takes place in the 1970s and is narrated by Alicia Western, a diagnosed schizophrenic and math genius. Their surname is Western because that’s what they stand for: the western postwar world order, with all its prosperity and order and all its moral compromises. In The Passenger , Bobby is in love with Alicia, who is dead. In Stella Maris , Alicia is in love with Bobby, who is in a coma. Both maintain they never consummated their relationship, but McCarthy gives you just enough room to wonder if that’s the truth.

The official line from the publishers is that The Passenger and Stella Maris each stand alone, but don’t believe them. The Passenger would be maddeningly opaque without Stella Maris to elaborate on some of its most compelling plot threads, and Stella Maris would be dry as book binding without The Passenger to leaven its many philosophical arguments. Reading them separately would be a cramped and despairing experience.

Not that The Passenger is exactly a light read in and of itself. While it gestures at a pulpy thriller plot involving a passenger vanishing from a crashed plane and mysterious government agencies chasing Bobby Western down, McCarthy serenely declines to either solve or, indeed, provide real suspects for any of his mysteries. They seem to exist merely to create the paranoid murk through which Western (as McCarthy consistently calls Bobby) must dive as he encounters and has Socratic dialogues with a series of colorful characters.

With a trans woman, Western discusses the question of whether there is a God or a female soul. With a magician turned private detective, he talks about the tragedy of beauty. And with an absolute blank slate of a character — so blank it’s almost offensive, really, as if McCarthy’s staring us in the eye and daring us to call him on it — Western gets into the real issue of these two novels: the atom bomb, quantum mechanics, and the question of whether reality is knowable.

“It’s all right to say that the reason we cant fully grasp the quantum world is because we didnt evolve in that world,” Western explains. (McCarthy’s still doing his thing with leaving out apostrophes and quotation marks.) “But the real mystery is the one that plagued Darwin. How we can come to know difficult things that have no survival value.”

Western comes by his understanding of this mystery honestly. He and Alicia are the children of one of the makers of the atom bomb, born, like all the postwar west, to the knowledge that they owe their wealth and good fortune to an atrocity that might have stopped a bigger atrocity. Both of them got an education in physics from their father, and both of them are deeply aware of the implications of modern physics for reality: the way it shows us that reality does not match our understanding, that the universe is less stable and more eerie than we thought .

Western responds to this knowledge by briefly pursuing a career as a physicist before failing his subject: He decides he isn’t quite good enough to do really valuable physics. Alicia, meanwhile, decides to go into pure math before being failed by her subject: since math has no provable reality independent of the human mind, she decides it is not equal to solving the problem of what reality is. Alicia’s project is to try to hold the truth of what contemporary physics and pure mathematics tell her completely in her mind, and the implication is that either the effort has shattered her mind or that only a shattered mind could attempt to do so in the first place.

Alicia appears periodically throughout The Passenger . Her death by suicide opens the novel, and in flashbacks we see her conversing with her hallucinations: a raggedy carnival barker of a man she calls the Thalidomide Kid, with flippers instead of hands, and all his hangers-on. (These hallucinations, it must be said, are appallingly tedious.) She doesn’t take center stage, though, until Stella Maris , which is made up entirely of Alicia’s conversations with her psychiatrist in the last year of her life.

There is something pleasingly, shockingly bare about Stella Maris after the lushness of The Passenger ’s rich, haunted atmosphere. The Passenger takes place in New Orleans in the summer, but Stella Maris is all cold, cold, midwest in the winter. Gone, too, are The Passenger ’s showy and circuitous plotlines about the JFK assassination being a cover for the mob taking out RFK and secret caches of gold buried in a dead grandmother’s basement. In Stella Maris , McCarthy has stripped away all the flesh down to the bare bone, the part that he’s actually interested in talking about.

It turns out the bone is more theoretical physics and pure math, the cosmic questions they inspire, and the creative work entailed in thinking them through.

“I knew what my brother did not,” Alicia explains to her shrink. “That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium.” The inexplicable void at the core of quantum physics is the demonium.

Writing women has never been McCarthy’s strong suit, and Alicia doesn’t exactly hold up as a rich and three-dimensional character. Her voice is appealingly spiky, but she’s more philosophical construct than whole human being. Yet halfway through Stella Maris , it becomes clear that she’s also an avatar for McCarthy himself, and for anyone who finds their unconscious mind doing their creative work for them.

“The core question is not how you do the math but how does the unconscious do it,” she says. “How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonder why the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it?” (Punctuation original.) You can slot in writing for math in that paragraph without changing the meaning a jot.

Speaking of writing, it’s just as great here as you would expect. Sometimes I think the reason literary criticism got obsessed with evaluating prose as “sentences” over the past few decades is simply that McCarthy’s are so good. They rattle out at you like little bullets, mean and punchy and precise.

Here he is on what it means that our reality is dependent on our observations: “In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black Suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.” The rat-a-tat-tat of those terse and isolated clauses; the easy richness of the phrase “alleged being” against the showy imagery of hellish black fire and silent black planets: When you’re as good as McCarthy, you make it look easy.

Physics tells us that the universe is full of black holes that exist at both sides of time, and that on a quantum level, mass exists not as a concrete fact but as a possibility.

Still, McCarthy is stingy with the pleasures of his prose. In this pair of novels, his most ravishing sentences tend to evoke horrors, either cosmic or personal. He is stingy, too, with the possibility of sweetness or joy. The only true tenderness in these novels comes from Alicia and Bobby’s incestuous love, which McCarthy treats as both redemptive and destructive.

Neither The Passenger nor Stella Maris is designed to be anyone’s gateway to Cormac McCarthy. They lack the visceral emotional intensity McCarthy can conjure at his best; they are pointedly spare and withholding. But taken together, they offer an intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer.

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

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."

Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers

Thank you for signing up.

Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more.

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.

Cormac McCarthy PIC: Mark Von Holden/Getty Images

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

Newsletters
Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

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.

Sign up for the Slate Culture Newsletter

The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox.

Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

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

Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support.

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?

Biggest New Books
Non-Fiction
All Categories
First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
How It Works

The Passenger

Embed our reviews widget for this book

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

September 2 -6, 2024

The surreal landscapes of Teletubbies
The pedagogy of campus protest encampments
The history of broadside ballads

Coffee House

A sunken wreck of a novel: Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger reviewed

A promising plot about a mysterious plane crash is lost in rambling meditations on psychosis, string theory and jfk’s assassination.

From magazine issue: 19 November 2022

Philip Hensher

The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy

Picador, pp. 400, £20

Stella Maris

Picador, pp. 192, £20

Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow.

There are conversations about what I think of as ‘novelists’ science’, not really intended to be understood

The great beasts of American literature have often aimed for prose that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike. Though there were always intensely mannered novelists in England, they had less of a heroically manly quality – Firbank, Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. There are certainly novelists at work now with a beautiful command of style, such as Peter Carey or Colson Whitehead, but few for whom style is everything, and most, like McCarthy, are getting on a bit.

Amis proposed an amusing critical game when thinking about authors of this sort: to write a sentence that they could never write. His example was the impossibility of Ivy Compton-Burnett writing: ‘That’s a pretty dress you’ve got on.’ With McCarthy, the game is simpler. It is almost impossible to imagine him writing the word ‘however’.

His clauses are hammered together with brutal simplicity, and his invariable choice of conjunction is simply ‘and’. The things of the world amass agglutinatively, piling up but hardly ever modifying each other with a simple ‘but’, or seeing how actions and facts affect what follows. The result has a compelling, fierce power; it is often compared to the prose in the Bible, or to Faulkner. To an English reader it bears an unexpected similarity to Henry Green at his most mannered, the incantatory style that C.M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta introduced. Much of this incantation is brought to bear on scenes of hideous, senseless violence, as in the following passage from Blood Meridian :

The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the ex-priest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled.

Most popular

Roger lewis, what prompted vivien leigh’s dark journey into madness.

McCarthy’s ancient Olivetti typewriter was auctioned in 2009 and made $254,500. I don’t wonder. I can’t imagine a more physical embodiment of a literary style: a machine where every key had to be banged down hard.

The style, like all styles, has its limitations. In a series of much acclaimed novels from Blood Meridian onwards, McCarthy has written about humanity at its most extreme, from the almost genocidal murder spree as America spread westwards in the 1850s, the lawless improvisations chronicled in The Border Trilogy and a lavishly horrible restaging of a Chaucer fable of money and death in No Country for Old Men . His themes of manliness and unfettered violence, and his casual expressions about race especially, would get any new American writer into serious trouble (‘They were followed by packs of wolves, coyotes, Indians’). Nevertheless, McCarthy appears to be loved by the most sedulously liberal readers, who as far as I can see haven’t even complained about his use of the N-word. Sometimes this requires some ingenuity. The Road is set in an America after what is pretty clearly a nuclear attack – ‘a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions’ result in a ceaseless fall of dust. It has been repeatedly and bizarrely recast as a description of the eventual effects of climate change. McCarthy is an extraordinarily plain and direct writer, but his impact on readers does not take simple forms.

His latest work, the first for a very long time, is an oddity: a two-novel sequence (a duology, I suppose). I will say straight away that the second novel, Stella Maris , is a disaster. It consists of nothing but sessions between one of the characters and a hospital psychiatrist. It’s a terrible idea to get a character to undergo detailed analysis by a professional, the equivalent of the beginner novelist’s device of having a character stop in front of a mirror and describe their appearance. It adds very little to the first volume, and has the unfortunate effect of focusing one’s doubts. I’m going to suggest putting Stella Maris aside altogether.

The Passenger has a fairly well-worn thriller premise. A commercial diver, Bobby Western, is sent to investigate a plane that has crashed into the sea. He finds seven passengers and two crew. (The underwater company inspires a repetition of a familiar McCarthy nightmare image, going as far back as the head of Captain White in a jar of mescal in Blood Meridian , ‘hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face’.) There should, however, be eight passengers. Back on land, officials arrive. Quite soon Western finds that the forces of the state seem intent on placing him under arrest, with his assets seized by the tax authorities and imprisonment a real possibility. His fellow diver is killed in an unnecessary accident. Western goes on the run. But who was the eighth passenger?

Alongside this, and only functioning as a periodically useful deus ex machina , is Bobby’s dead sister Alicia. She was a genius; there is suspicion that she and Bobby were sexually entwined. She was also mad. Between the chapters of Bobby’s story there are episodes from Alicia’s psychosis. She is visited by a gang of hallucinated beings, led by a grotesque called the Kid. McCarthy’s dedication to using the most offensive terms about minorities bears fruit. These chapters are sour and repulsive, as the voice describes the Kid’s thalidomide-formed body: ‘Except of course they weren’t really hands. Just flippers. Sort of like a seal has.’ More grotesques turn up later, including a pair of ‘blackface minstrels’ saying ‘Yassuh yassuh’. They are quite amusing in small doses. I rather enjoyed it when Alicia, having been subjected to electroshock therapy, is visited by a blackened, burnt and angry Kid – but small doses is not what we get.

The novel heads on and expands into more general catastrophes, redeemed only by the continuing power of that incantatory manner. The Westerns’ father, it emerges, was responsible for working on the atom bombs dropped on Japan. This revelation has some effects on the novel, none very admirable. A paragraph on the horrors of Hiroshima seems routinely dropped in (‘burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium’). There are conversations about what I’ve come to think of as ‘novelists’ science’, not really intended to be understood: ‘A lot of people thought that S-Matrix theory was a reasonable theory. Promising, even. It was just superseded by chromodynamics.’ Alicia emerges as a child prodigy of a very routine sort – she is a mathematician and a virtuoso on the violin (of course), who is recognised, aged 13, as a world expert on baroque violin makers. Just for once couldn’t one of these fictional prodigies be really good at the bassoon?

A skilled editor might have cut some of the grosser absurdities, such as a diversion into Kennedy assassination conspiracies, quite unrelated to anything else. And there are some startlingly banal exchanges:

Make it two, he said. Two what. Hamburgers. He’s having a cheeseburger. Okay. Cheeseburger. Sure. Everything? Yeah. Fries? Fries.

But here we come close to a dangerous area for the editor, because the off-point, idly time-wasting material, apparently irrelevant to theme, plot or argument, provides stretches of compelling mastery.

The glory of this novel comes in a succession of scenes in bars. Old drinking pals with nothing to do josh and tease and spin long-polished tales to their half-sozzled familiars: Long John, a bar-room walking thesaurus (a type as old as Pistol, Falstaff’s crony), Darling Dave, Seals, Bianca Pharaoh and Debussy Fields, the wonderfully self-christened transgender woman with a thing for Bobby. The characters are beautifully done, as good as V.S. Pritchett, and the reader feels a tender regret at John’s end that is never a possibility in Alicia’s tragedy.

In these chapters we glimpse a much more powerful and affecting novel – one that, without the trappings of conspiracy and last-minute rescues from disaster (in other words, the plot), brings the mysteries of age, decay, death and missed opportunities for love into focus through the rambling, drunk conversations heard in a shabby bar. Like too many American novelists, McCarthy has been misled by a conviction that he needs to say something important. He should have reflected that what lives forever is Miss Bates on Box Hill in Emma, or the unnamed young man in Our Mutual Friend who, trying to exercise his French, says ‘Esker…?’, never to reappear. Debussy Fields might have been among the immortals. Now she sinks with a great wreck of a book that goes on and on about string theory, who killed Kennedy and all the rest. A waste of a great talent.

September sale: get three months free

Subscribe today for unlimited digital access for three months – as well as digital Telegraph access

Already a subscriber? Log in

No one will change their mind about Hamas

Also in Book Reviews

More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

Also by Philip Hensher

The trivial details about royalty are what really fascinate us

The Greens are turning on the SNP

Join the debate for free — this month only

This month, be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for free. We’ll also give you three months’ free digital access to the Telegraph .

Member Login
Library Patron Login
Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim

Book Summary and Reviews of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

The Passenger

by Cormac McCarthy

Critics' Consensus:
Readers' Rating:
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
Write a Review
Buy This Book

About this book

Book summary.

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.

"Beyond the Book" articles
Free books to read and review (US only)
Find books by time period, setting & theme
Read-alike suggestions by book and author
Book club discussions
and much more!
Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"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

Author Information

Books by this Author

Cormac McCarthy Author Biography

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.

Link to Cormac McCarthy's Website

Other books by Cormac McCarthy at BookBrowse

More Recommendations

Readers also browsed . . ..

What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
Ilium by Lea Carpenter
The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn
The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni
The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, Sam Bett
The Recruit by Alan Drew
The Villa by Rachel Hawkins
How Can I Help You by Laura Sims
Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen

more thrillers...

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

We'll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida

Discover the bestselling Japanese novel celebrating the healing power of cats.

Solve this clue:

K U with T J

and be entered to win..

Book Club Giveaway!

Before the Mango Ripens by Afabwaje Kurian

Both epic and intimate, this debut announces a brilliant new talent for readers of Imbolo Mbue and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Your guide to exceptional books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Free Weekly Newsletters

Discover what's happening in the world of books: reviews, previews, interviews, giveaways, and more plus when you subscribe, we'll send you a free issue of our member's only ezine..

Spam Free : Your email is never shared with anyone; opt out any time.

Book Excerpt

‘The Passenger,’ by Cormac McCarthy

A passage from the author’s first novel since his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 book “The Road.”

Credit... Patrik Svensson

Supported by

Share full article

“ The Passenger, ” Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years , focuses on Bobby Western, who works as a salvage diver and discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken jet. It will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on Oct. 25, followed by “Stella Maris,” a novel whose story and characters intertwine with “The Passenger,” on Dec. 6.

Audio Excerpt: ‘The Passenger’

He sat wrapped in one of the gray rescue blankets from the emergency bag and drank hot tea. The dark sea lapped about. The Coast Guard boat that had pulled up a hundred yards off sat rocking in the swells with the running lights on and beyond that ten miles to the north you could see the lights of trucks moving along the causeway, coming out of New Orleans and heading east along US 90 toward Pass Christian, Biloxi, Mobile. Mozart’s second violin concerto was playing on the tapedeck. The air temperature was forty-four degrees and it was three seventeen in the morning.

The tender was lying on his elbows with the headset on watching the dark water beneath them. From time to time the sea would ﬂare with a soft sulphurous light where forty feet down Oiler was working with the cuttingtorch. Western watched the tender and he blew on the tea and sipped it and he watched the lights moving along the causeway like the slow cellular crawl of waterdrops on a wire. Strobing faintly where they passed behind the concrete balusters. There was an onshore wind coming up past the western tip of Cat Island and there was a light chop to the water. Smell of oil and the rich tidal funk of mangrove and saltgrass from the islands. The tender sat up and took off the headset and began to riﬂe through the toolbox.

How’s he doing?

What’s he want?

The big sidecutters.

He hooked a set of shears to a carabiner and snapped the carabiner over the workline and watched the shears slide into the sea. He looked at Western.

How deep can you use acetylene?

Thirty, thirty-ﬁve feet.

And after that it’s oxyarc.

The tender nodded and pulled the headset back on.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

Want all of The Times? Subscribe .

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

Copy Link URL Copied!

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.

Cormac McCarthy’s rugged road to respectability

Nov. 22, 2009

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.

Book cover for "The Passenger," by Cormac McCarthy features sunbeams through clouds over the ocean

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.

Ivy Pochoda quarantines with Cormac McCarthy, Dr. Seuss and gymnastics videos

In our latest quarantine diary, the author of ‘These Women’ digs ‘Blood Meridian’ but can’t get enough of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

May 28, 2020

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.

Cover of "Stella Maris," by Cormac McCarthy includes a woman floating in water

“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 .

A novel co-written by Keanu Reeves is actually great (and just waiting to be adapted into his next flick)

July 17, 2024

Ruby Todd, author "Bright Objects: A Novel"

A debut novel that looks to the heavens and to the Heaven’s Gate cult

July 10, 2024

We’re living in a new age of McCarthyism, says author Patrick Nathan

June 3, 2024

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

From left, Jimmy O. Yang, Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Shaboozey.

Entertainment & Arts

Fall preview: The best movies, TV shows, music, books and arts of the season

Sept. 6, 2024

LOS ANGELES -- SEPTEMBER 3, 2024: David LaChapelle in his Los Angeles studio on Tuesday, September 3, 2024

David LaChapelle overcame ‘emotionally stunting’ workaholism to enjoy photographing again

Venus Williams’ latest off-court serve? A wellness book

Sept. 5, 2024

A man and woman kiss within a flame, while a ring of carnations form a heart around them.

This is what’s missing in our sex lives in 2024, according to Esther Perel

Hiro Arikawa

The passengers on the hankyu line.

Select a format:

Over four million copies sold in Japan 'You will be wrapped in laughter and tears ' Reader review ***** 'What I love about it is its Kindness ' Reader review ***** 'I wanted to tap the shoulders of the characters' Reader review ***** Famously scenic, the Hankyu commuter train trundles daily through Japanese landscape unaware of the heartaches of the passengers it carries. On the outward journey we are introduced to the emotional dilemmas of five characters as we puzzle out how they will unravel; on the return journey six months later, we watch them resolve: - a young man meets the young woman, who always happens to borrow a library book just before he can take it out himself - a woman in a white bridal dress boards looking inexplicably sad - a university student leaves his hometown for the first time - a girl prepares to leave her abusive boyfriend; - an old lady discusses adopting a dog with her granddaughter.

As the seasons come around, so the Hankyu line trundles on carrying the lives and loves of its passengers ever forwards.

About the author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy

IMAGES

'The Passengers' book review: A thrilling ride with a message
The Passenger (The Passenger, #1) by Cormac McCarthy
Review of The Passenger (9781605989570)
The Passenger
The Passenger and Stella Maris: Cormac McCarthy duo fall short on plot
The Passenger

VIDEO

The Passenger (2023) MOVIE REVIEW
Movie Review of The Passenger
Passengers
The Passenger Movie Review--Don't Let The Past Haunt You, Face It!
The Passenger (2023) Movie Review
Whale Watching with Seek Alaska Tours

COMMENTS

Review: 'The Passenger,' by Cormac McCarthy
Review: 'The Passenger,' by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's 'The Passenger,' 'Stella Maris' look at the human
The Passenger and Stella Maris -- the author's first two books in more than a decade — seem to want to decode the meaning of life, both as standalone novels and together as intertwined works.
The Passenger (The Passenger #1) by Cormac McCarthy
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. Genres Fiction Historical Fiction Audiobook Literary Fiction Mystery Literature Novels.
Cormac McCarthy Has Never Been Better
Cormac McCarthy Has Never Been Better
THE PASSENGER
New York Times Bestseller. 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 ...
Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris: Review
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 ...
News, sport and opinion from the Guardian's US edition
We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.
Review
Cormac McCarthy's 'The Passenger' is a strange ride into darkness. (Miko Maciaszek for The Washington Post) 8 min. Review by Ron Charles. October 18, 2022 at 5:14 p.m. EDT. Now that 89-year ...
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy: a portrait of inconsolable grief
The Passenger. Author: Cormac McCarthy. ISBN-13: 978-0330457422. Publisher: Picador. Guideline Price: £20. It's been 16 years since Cormac McCarthy published The Road and seven more since this ...
The Passenger
McCarthy returns now with not one, but two linked novels, which together tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by family history—their physicist father helped invent the atom bomb. In The Passenger, salvage diver Bobby stumbles upon a murder mystery while exploring a submerged plane wreck.". Read ...
The Passenger
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 10th ...
Cormac McCarthy Peers Into the Abyss
The eighty-nine-year-old novelist has long dealt with apocalyptic themes. But a pair of novels about ill-starred mathematicians takes him down a different road. McCarthy, for the first time in his ...
Review: Cormac McCarthy returns with cryptic 'The Passenger'
By Rob Merrill. Published 8:04 AM PDT, October 31, 2022. "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 Passenger (McCarthy novel)
The Passenger (McCarthy novel)
The Passenger and Stella Maris review: Cormac McCarthy declines to
The Passenger would be maddeningly opaque without Stella Maris to elaborate on some of its most compelling plot threads, and Stella Maris would be dry as book binding without The Passenger to ...
Book review: The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy
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 Related topics: Western
Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris, reviewed
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 ...
Book Marks reviews of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger is far from McCarthy's finest work, but that's because he has had the nerve to push himself into new places, at the age of all-but-90. He has tried something in these novels that he'd never done before. Read Full Review >>. Rave James Wood, The New Yorker. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy ...
A sunken wreck of a novel: Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger reviewed
It adds very little to the first volume, and has the unfortunate effect of focusing one's doubts. I'm going to suggest putting Stella Maris aside altogether. The Passenger has a fairly well ...
Summary and reviews of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Book Summary. 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.
Book Excerpt: 'The Passenger,' Cormac McCarthy's First Novel in 16
98. "The Passenger," Cormac McCarthy's first novel in 16 years, focuses on Bobby Western, who works as a salvage diver and discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken jet. It ...
Review: Cormac McCarthy's 'The Passenger' and 'Stella Maris'
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 ...
Cormac McCarthy: The Passenger review
The Passenger is classic McCarthy fare: totally abstruse, excellently descriptive, and frustratingly digressive.It has elements of many of his previous novels, the strongest being the narrative of the perpetually wandering anti-hero. Western is a very obvious symbol of something dying at the frontiers of America, no longer at home in a country of which he is emblematic, drawn inexorably to the ...
Review
That book, which was a bestseller, explored the dynamics of the Trump family and offered personal insights into Donald Trump's upbringing and behavior. (Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist.)
'Cocaine and Rhinestones' Review: Tammy & George by the Book
BEST OF Books & Arts in Review. The Best Books of July. Summer Books. Best in Business. The 10 Best Books of 2023. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of ...
The Passengers on the Hankyu Line
Over four million copies sold in Japan 'You will be wrapped in laughter and tears' Reader review***** 'What I love about it is its Kindness' Reader review***** 'I wanted to tap the shoulders of the characters' Reader review***** Famously scenic, the Hankyu commuter train trundles daily through Japanese landscape unaware of the heartaches of the passengers it carries.

Book Reviews

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

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

The Incandescent Wisdom of Cormac McCarthy

Explore the January/February 2023 Issue

About the Author

THE PASSENGER

IT STARTS WITH US

Please select an existing bookshelf

Please sign up to continue.

Almost there!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

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

More Must-Reads from TIME

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

Most viewed

The Best Fiction Books » New Literary Fiction

Other books by Cormac McCarthy

Regular Features

Newsletters

Fall Reading

Word of Mouth

Cormac McCarthy Peers Into the Abyss

New Yorker Favorites

Review: Cormac McCarthy returns with cryptic ’The Passenger’

We need your support today

Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels are deliberately frustrating

Most Popular

Today, Explained

This is the title for the native ad

More in Culture

Book review: The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers

The Grim Return of Cormac McCarthy

Sign up for the Slate Culture Newsletter

The Passenger

Stella Maris

The Passenger

Embed our reviews widget for this book

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

September 2 -6, 2024

A sunken wreck of a novel: Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger reviewed

The Passenger

Stella Maris

Most popular

September sale: get three months free

No one will change their mind about Hamas

More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

The trivial details about royalty are what really fascinate us

The Greens are turning on the SNP

Join the debate for free — this month only

Book Summary and Reviews of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger

About this book

Media Reviews

Author Information

Cormac McCarthy Author Biography

Other books by Cormac McCarthy at BookBrowse

More Recommendations

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

Book Club Giveaway!

Free Weekly Newsletters

‘The Passenger,’ by Cormac McCarthy

Audio Excerpt: ‘The Passenger’

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

Ivy Pochoda quarantines with Cormac McCarthy, Dr. Seuss and gymnastics videos

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

The Road: A Novel

More to Read

A novel co-written by Keanu Reeves is actually great (and just waiting to be adapted into his next flick)

A debut novel that looks to the heavens and to the Heaven’s Gate cult

We’re living in a new age of McCarthyism, says author Patrick Nathan

More From the Los Angeles Times

Fall preview: The best movies, TV shows, music, books and arts of the season

David LaChapelle overcame ‘emotionally stunting’ workaholism to enjoy photographing again

Venus Williams’ latest off-court serve? A wellness book

This is what’s missing in our sex lives in 2024, according to Esther Perel

Hiro Arikawa

Select a format: