new cormac mccarthy book review

The Incandescent Wisdom of Cormac McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On the Shelf

Two New Novels by Cormac McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Road: A Novel

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

Sept. 24, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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.

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The Passenger: The phantom world of Cormac McCarthy

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

By John Gray

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

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

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

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

[See also: The secret world of Mick Herron ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Passenger

Stella Maris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 22, 2022

Naipaul’s Unreal Africa

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In The Pole , J. M. Coetzee returns to the novelist’s ethical and aesthetic imperative: to attempt to understand others for whom we may not, at first, feel much sympathy.

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Michael Gorra is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War , among other books. He teaches at Smith. (November 2023)

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

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

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

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

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The Grim Return of Cormac McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Passenger

By Cormac McCarthy. Knopf.

Stella Maris

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

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

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ is a strange ride into darkness

N ow that 89-year-old Cormac McCarthy is widely hailed as one of our greatest living authors, it’s hard to remember that when he published “ All the Pretty Horses ” in 1992, few people were waiting for it. Although McCarthy had been writing for decades, his work — including the epic western “ Blood Meridian ” — was still largely the secret treasure of a small retinue of intense fans.

Inconspicuousness suited the author just fine, but like every fragile thing in the McCarthy universe, it would soon die.

“All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume of his Border trilogy, flirted with the bestseller list for months and then went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. McCarthy did not attend the New York ceremony to accept his prize, but the damage was done: He was becoming famous.

Nothing, though, could have prepared the author for the clamorous success of “ The Road ,” which extended his apocalyptic themes to the literal end of civilization. This lean story about a father and his little boy walking through a hellscape mesmerized — and terrified — readers. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize, which made perfect sense, but it also won a spot on Oprah’s Book Club, which felt like a rip in the space-time continuum because it meant McCarthy would, for the first time, give an interview on TV. There, finally, we saw the shy, gentle writer, not so much disdainful of public adoration as inert to it.

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For the last 16 years, McCarthy’s swelling fan base has been circling, picking at crumbs of information about his next project. This month, the moment of unveiling has arrived with a tempest of publicity that’s sure to draw in even more readers.

Prepare to be baffled.

“ The Passenger ” exhibits McCarthy’s signature markings, but it’s a different species than we’ve spotted before. In these pages, the author’s legendary violence has been infinitely reduced to the clash of subatomic particles.

Bobby Western, the novel’s contemplative, haunted hero, works as a salvage diver. We meet him at 3:17 a.m. off the Gulf Coast. He and a small crew are examining a private jet resting on the ocean floor. After his partner cuts open the door with an underwater torch, Western swims into this fresh tomb:

“He kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away,” McCarthy writes. “The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation.”

A few minutes later, back in the inflatable boat, Western shakes his head. “There’s nothing about this that rattles right.” The bodies look unaffected by a crash. And the pilot’s flight bag and the data box are missing from the cockpit.

Western’s partner asks, “You think there’s already been somebody down there, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

For several days, Western hears nothing in the news about a jet crashing into the gulf. Then two men with badges appear at his apartment in New Orleans. They want to know how many bodies he saw in the plane because “there seems to be a passenger missing.”

McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form, just as he reworked the apocalypse in “The Road.” Indeed, “The Passenger” sometimes feels more reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “ The Trial .” Western knows he’s suspected of something , but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness — never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in “ No Country for Old Men ” — but Western knows that his life is in danger and that he must run.

First, though, he ruminates, and that sustained rumination creates a very different novel than the heart-thumping thriller the opening suggests. Instead, we’re drawn deeper and deeper into the troubled soul of Bobby Western. His father worked with Robert Oppenheimer to create the first atomic bombs, and Western still labors under a kind of genetic guilt for unleashing such horror on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In a futile attempt to come to terms with that legacy and other ghosts, Western chats with a collection of barflies who seem to have wandered in from other classics. There’s Debussy Fields, a trans woman doing an extravagant imitation of Brett Ashley from “ The Sun Also Rises .” And there’s Sheddan, who sounds like he never recovered from playing Falstaff in a college production of “Henry IV.”

“A pox upon you,” he says. “You see in me an ego vast, unstructured, and baseless. But in all candor I’ve not even the remotest aspirations to the heights of self-regard which the Squire commands.”

The style — a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution — is pure McCarthy. But so is the irritating tendency toward grandiosity. “Evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure,” he writes. “The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.”

The Book of Job might get away with language like that, and maybe Melville can pull it off on a particularly bleak day, but here it risks sounding comically overwrought.

10 noteworthy books for October

Brooding and good-looking, Western “is sinking into a darkness he cannot even comprehend.” Women want to save him; men want to befriend him. And why not? Working as a salvage diver sounds exotic and cool. He earned a scholarship to study physics at Caltech. He used to be a racecar driver in Europe, and he still roars around in his Maserati. (He thinks of the trident symbol on the car’s grill as “Schrödinger’s wavefunction.” Sure.) And — yes, seriously — he lives off thousands of gold coins he found buried under his dead grandmother’s house.

But on the non-sexy side of the ledger, Western is still pining for his little sister, Alice, a mathematical prodigy who wanted to bear his baby. Apparently, during her brief, tumultuous life, they shared more than a love of complex equations.

(That shuffling sound you hear is Hollywood directors tiptoeing away.)

One of Western’s friends tries to cast this incestuous relationship in terms of a Greek tragedy, but McCarthy suggests it’s a geek tragedy. Throughout the novel, we’re subjected to intercalary chapters about Alice and a menagerie of Vaudeville freaks who inhabit her psychotic hallucinations. Chief among these figures is the Thalidomide Kid, who torments her in conversations so bizarre and relentless that I began to wish I were on that plane at the bottom of the gulf.

Weirdly, in early December, McCarthy is releasing a related short novel called “ Stella Maris ” — the name of a psych hospital — which is composed entirely of dialogue between Alice and a doctor. I doubt there are more than a few hundred people in the country who can follow Alice’s freewheeling allusions to theoretical physics and advanced mathematics — certainly her doctor can’t. But the bigger mystery is why this material, which depends entirely on “The Passenger,” is being published separately.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a mercy. “The Passenger” is already burdened by a reference to space aliens, a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination and enough scientific arcana to choke a Higgs boson. McCarthy can’t go long without referring to the work of Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein, Rotblat, Glashow, Teller, Bohm, Chew, Feynman and other scientists. Unless you majored in physics, your string theory is going to get badly tangled up with your Yang-Mills. This is the kind of novel in which people wonder, “What happened to Kaluza-Klein?”

Later, we’re told that a Swiss mathematician and physicist named Ernst Stueckelberg “worked out a good bit of the S-Matrix theory and the renormalization group.”

I’m happy to hear that worked out, but I still have no idea what the hell it means.

When McCarthy descends from Mount Olympus and writes in his close, precise voice about Western carving out the ordinary activities of his day, the novel suddenly hums with genuine profundity. But many pages strain self-consciously to explore Big Ideas about the Nature of Reality. The explanations are so cursory that we never get to see the light — just the shadows on the cave wall. Unlike the cerebral novels of Richard Powers, which create the illusion that you might actually understand neuropsychology, genetics or artificial intelligence, “The Passenger” casts readers into a black hole of ignorance.

Near the end, a friend tells Western, “We still dont know what this is about.”

Get used to it, man.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

The Passenger

By Cormac McCarthy. Knopf. 400 pp. $30

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Cormac McCarthy: two new novels coming in 2022, 16 years after The Road

The Passenger and Stella Maris will be published in October and November, marking McCarthy’s long awaited return to publishing

Sixteen years since his last novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s long awaited follow-up has finally been confirmed – with not one, but two new novels to be published one month apart later this year.

The Passenger, out in October, and Stella Maris, out in November, follow siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, “who are tormented by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atom bomb”, reported the New York Times on Tuesday.

Regarded as one of the greatest living US writers, 88-year-old McCarthy has not published a novel since The Road in 2006. The post-apocalyptic survival story won the Pulitzer prize and became a bestseller.

It’s an unusually long gap for the novelist, who has published 10 novels since 1965. The Passenger has been highly anticipated since 2009, when a Texas university acquired McCarthy’s archive , including notes for an unfinished novel with that working title; however, the notes were restricted until publication. The acquisition revealed that McCarthy was then working on three novels – but there had been no update in the decade since.

On Tuesday evening, US publisher Knopf revealed McCarthy had the two books coming in 2022. McCarthy had delivered a full draft of one of the novels to his editors eight years ago, kept secret at the publishing house.

The Passenger, published on 25 October, opens as Bobby, a salvage diver working on the Gulf Coast in 1980, explores the wreckage of a sunken jet. He discovers that the black box, the pilot’s bag and one of the dead passengers are all missing. The 400-page novel has “the pace and twists of a thriller” as Bobby is drawn into the mystery of the crash.

Stella Maris marks the first time McCarthy has focused on a female protagonist. The 200-page novel, out on 22 November, follows Bobby’s sister Alicia, “a math prodigy whose intellect frightens people and whose hallucinations appear as characters, with their own distinct voices”.

“I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years,” McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal in a 2009 interview . “I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.”

McCarthy’s editor at Knopf, Jenny Jackson, told the New York Times: “It’s a format for Cormac to allow Alicia to explore her obsessions, which from what I can tell happen to be Cormac’s obsessions. It’s a book of ideas.”

When the manuscripts were completed, Knopf considered publishing the books as one volume, both on the same day or a year apart, but settled on a one-month gap.

“Here we have not one but two novels by pretty much America’s greatest living novelist,” Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur said. “How do we publish in a way that gives readers time to experience each one but also gives readers the satisfaction of experiencing the conversation between the two novels?”

The two novels mark a departure for McCarthy, who has set most of his works in the American south and southwest, exploring humanity’s capacity for good and evil in austere tales of great violence and depravity. The New York Times reported that McCarthy has been fascinated with mathematics and theoretical physics for years, having surrounded himself with experts in both fields at the Santa Fe Institute , a research institute where he has worked for decades.

McCarthy, who rarely gives interviews and declined to speak for the announcement, is not unaware of the anticipation. Asked by Oprah Winfrey in 2007 if he cared that he had millions of readers, he said: “In all honesty I have to say I really don’t. You would like for the people who appreciate the book to read it, but, as far as many, many people reading it, so what?”

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

John Burnett

Author Cormac McCarthy attends the premiere of "The Road" in New York on Nov. 16, 2009. McCarthy has two novels coming out this fall. Evan Agostini/AP hide caption

Author Cormac McCarthy attends the premiere of "The Road" in New York on Nov. 16, 2009. McCarthy has two novels coming out this fall.

Devoted Cormac McCarthy fans who have been waiting 16 years for new work from the renowned American writer are in for a surprise.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy Knopf hide caption

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

The reclusive author's two new interconnected novels — being released on Oct. 25 and Dec. 6, respectively — are hard to categorize.

The first book , The Passenger , opens with a mysterious plane crash at sea that's searched by a neurotic salvage diver who's obsessed with his sister. The entire second book, Stella Maris , consists of erudite conversations between that sister, who happens to be a mathematical genius, and a therapist in the psychiatric hospital where she's committed herself.

By all accounts, McCarthy has been working on them for at least four decades.

"Eight years ago, it was so cloak-and-dagger that we were working on these books because McCarthy fans are rabid and any whiff of there being new books is going to be huge news," says Jenny Jackson, executive editor at Knopf, who began working with him in secret in 2014. "We'd walk down the hall and hand off manuscripts in person. And I wasn't telling anyone what we were working on."

For the interview, Jackson comes to the Napoleon House, a venerable watering hole in the French Quarter of New Orleans — where McCarthy lived as a young, penurious writer. The protagonist in The Passenger is a troubled commercial diver named Bobby Western who frequents the Napoleon House for rambling discourses with eccentric buddies.

"At the beginning," Jackson says, "there's this big cast of boisterous characters and they're all working as divers and having drinks together and going out to restaurants. And then at the end they're each kind of on their own singular journey."

Neither of these two new books contains the savagery and bloodletting McCarthy readers have come to expect. There's less action overall and more dialogue. Readers may wonder if McCarthy has mellowed now that he's 89 years old.

The breathless blurb on the back cover of The Passenger reads : "A sunken jet. Nine passengers. A missing body...A salvage diver pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding." But this is not a fast-paced crime thriller like No Country For Old Men , which became an Oscar-winning screenplay for the Coen Brothers.

The Passenger starts out as a who-dun-it but then veers into Bobby's metaphysical musings.

"When you're Cormac McCarthy and you've written The Road , what on earth can you do next except tackle God and human consciousness?" Jackson asks.

The Road is McCarthy's best-selling last novel, released in 2006, about a father and son's harrowing journey among latter-day cannibals in a post-apocalyptic landscape. It won a Pulitzer.

McCarthy described the genesis of The Road in his only broadcast interview, granted to Oprah Winfrey in 2007. He says he happened to be in El Paso with his young son.

"I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste and I thought a lot about my little boy. And so I wrote these pages and that was the end of it. And then about four years later I was in Ireland and I woke up one morning and realized it wasn't two pages, it was a book."

The new paired books are more dense than dark. Notably, they reflect McCarthy's love, and thorough understanding, of theoretical physics and mathematics. He has said, in his few interviews, that he seeks out the company of scientists at the Santa Fe Institute near his home in New Mexico.

Determined McCarthy fanatics have found advanced copies of the books, and they have provoked strong reactions. Some McCarthy aficionados were interviewed in September at a Cormac McCarthy conference in Savannah, Georgia.

"The novels explore all these aspects of human mental behavior. I think they're just marvelous," says Diane Luce, former president of the Cormac McCarthy Society.

And Bryan Giemza, literature professor at Texas Tech University, says: "In some ways, they're flawed. They are likely to be inscrutable to a lot of people. Let's just say they're not my favorite novels."

A third early read, Lydia Cooper, English professor at Creighton University, says: "They are brain teasers, but they're also really compelling. The characters are really rich and fascinating. I think people are going to love them or hate them."

One of the organizers of the conference in Georgia was Stacey Peebles, an English professor who teaches a McCarthy course at Centre College, and is editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal.

"I've had students coming by my office. They say, 'Are you going to teach the new ones? I'm so excited.' "

Peebles has also read both new books.

"We've been waiting for these a long time," she says. "There's always the possibility that you're going to read something new and be disappointed. But I read 'em once. I read 'em again. And I'll probably keep reading 'em. I mean, all of McCarthy's works have sentences that'll just stop you cold, but these have a lot of those."

Here's one of those sentences, from The Passenger (you can read a longer, exclusive-to-NPR excerpt from Stella Maris here ):

"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 from out of that black and heaving alcahest."

McCarthy — who still composes on a manual typewriter — is considered one of the greatest and most influential writers in the English language.

"I began to notice fairly early on that a lot of these students were writing like Cormac McCarthy," says Texas novelist and historian Stephen Harrigan, who taught a fiction writing course at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He recalls with a chuckle, "They were writing with strange locutions like, 'He rode isolate into the darkling plain.' That kind of language. And this Old Testament archaic usage creates a kind of spell, particularly for young writers."

The McCarthy spell is about to be cast again, and not just for readers but for researchers.

Cormac McCarthy's literary papers are archived in a locked cabinet in the Witliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos.

"It's about a hundred boxes of Cormac material that we have here," says Steve Davis, literary curator at the Witliff, as he rolls open the cabinet. "His collection begins with his first book, Outer Dark ," and it ends with early drafts of The Passenger .

The last box has been restricted for 15 years, since the Witliff acquired McCarthy's coveted papers, and McCarthy scholars have already been lining up to delve into it. The final box will be opened the same day The Passenger goes on sale — but Davis offered a sneak preview.

"This is the box for the new novel, The Passenger ," he says, "and we're gonna pull out this first big folder which says, 'The Passenger, old first draft. Typescript and photocopied pages, heavily corrected in pencil.'"

Perhaps the contents of this box will reveal how Cormac McCarthy's challenging new novels evolved, and why he wrote them.

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A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION

by Cormac McCarthy ; illustrated by Manu Larcenet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2024

Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.

A suitably dark graphic treatment of McCarthy’s postapocalyptic masterpiece.

French artist Larcenet delivers a full 21 frames before McCarthy’s main characters, a father and his preadolescent son, speak. That’s fitting: In the original novel, the father is grimly taciturn, while the boy is full of anxious questions: Are we the good guys in the piece? Are the bad guys going to eat us? Larcenet’s landscape is the dark, dead land of nuclear winter; in an afternote, he admits to liking snow, though atop every snowbank here, it seems, there’s a corpse. Larcenet’s rendering of the father looks nothing like the Viggo Mortensen of the film, for, as he writes, “I’ve been racking my brain to avoid any reference to the movie adaptation.” Instead, the man looks like one of the hirsute Trumpets who stormed the Capitol. But then, so do all the other grown-ups, personal hygiene having fallen victim to the irradiated world of the future. McCarthy’s story is simple: The man and the boy have to head south to find a place they hope isn’t frozen solid. On the way, wheeling a shopping cart, they have to keep their few possessions safe from scavengers while avoiding gangs of roving, cannibalistic brigands. The son remembers a few hallmarks of the old world, praying that a dead family whose larder they’ve raided “are safe in heaven.” Dad, meanwhile, is full of more instructive notes: “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget,” he remarks amid an endless landscape of tortured corpses and detached skulls. The story, as with McCarthy’s work in general, ends happily only if you count mere survival as a satisfying resolution. Larcenet’s brooding black-and-white drawings suit the original perfectly.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024

ISBN: 9781419776779

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Abrams ComicArts

Review Posted Online: yesterday

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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SEEN & HEARD

SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN

by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by Gurihiru ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2020

A clever and timely conversation on reclaiming identity and acknowledging one’s full worth.

Superman confronts racism and learns to accept himself with the help of new friends.

In this graphic-novel adaptation of the 1940s storyline entitled “The Clan of the Fiery Cross” from The Adventures of Superman radio show, readers are reintroduced to the hero who regularly saves the day but is unsure of himself and his origins. The story also focuses on Roberta Lee, a young Chinese girl. She and her family have just moved from Chinatown to Metropolis proper, and mixed feelings abound. Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane’s colleague from the Daily Planet , takes a larger role here, befriending his new neighbors, the Lees. An altercation following racial slurs directed at Roberta’s brother after he joins the local baseball team escalates into an act of terrorism by the Klan of the Fiery Kross. What starts off as a run-of-the-mill superhero story then becomes a nuanced and personal exploration of the immigrant experience and blatant and internalized racism. Other main characters are White, but Black police inspector William Henderson fights his own battles against prejudice. Clean lines, less-saturated coloring, and character designs reminiscent of vintage comics help set the tone of this period piece while the varied panel cuts and action scenes give it a more modern sensibility. Cantonese dialogue is indicated through red speech bubbles; alien speech is in green.

Pub Date: May 12, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77950-421-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: DC

Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by Kendall Goode & Alison Acton

by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by LeUyen Pham

by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by Les McClaine & Alison Acton

PROPHET SONG

by Paul Lynch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2023

Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.

As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.

For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023

ISBN: 9780802163011

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Paul Lynch

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Garth Risk Hallberg Takes On the Life-and-Times Novel

By Thomas Mallon

The Great American Novel is a long-dead cultural aspiration, extinguished by a healthy realization that the country is too big and too varied to generate any singular, definitive volume. American novelists tend, in our time, to earn public recognition of greatness in a steady, incremental (one is almost tempted to say un-American) way: through the long-term production of many books that arrive with a certain regularity and are roughly on the same scale, one to the next. For writers as different as Alice McDermott, Colson Whitehead , and Richard Powers, the greatness classification comes more from accrual than from explosion.

Even so, some younger novelists with exceptional gifts seem to have a romantically persistent notion of the single-book catapult. Now in his mid-forties, but still boyishly author-photo’d, Garth Risk Hallberg continues to wobble with promise and perplexity. His novels, so far only three in number, sometimes murmur and sometimes roar, operating by wisps of inference or by maximalist elaboration. He has flirted with a kind of cosmic connectedness, or at least a large sociopolitical canvas, before subsiding—as he has done with his new book, “ The Second Coming ” (Knopf)—back into the super-circumscribed and familial. Looking at the three books together, a reader perceives not so much a multifarious œuvre as a series of make-or-break shots.

Hallberg’s first novel, “ A Field Guide to the North American Family ” (2007), was a sort of multimedia art project that originated on a Web site and got published first by a small press. On the verso pages, mini-narratives from various points of view melded into the shared story of two Long Island families, the Harrisons and the Hungates. The recto pages contained pictures, sometimes inscrutable (an X-ray of hands, a Saran-wrapped hunting trophy), taken by myriad photographers. Definitional captions, occasionally just clever, but often truly witty, offered a taxonomy for any extraterrestrial having a first encounter with the human species: “Rumor, a resilient parasite , feeds on the Secret until its host is destroyed. In agricultural areas , Discretion is sometimes employed as a check on the Rumor population. ”

Hallberg was definitely a writer to watch, but when his second novel, “ City on Fire ,” arrived, eight years later, it bore only traces of resemblance to “Field Guide,” sporting occasional photos and other collage elements, including small bursts of cursive writing, for which he has a continuing fondness. At nine hundred and eleven pages, “City on Fire” was a prolonged tour de force, a woven sheet determined to cover all of New York City while maintaining an extremely high thread count of detail. Its swing-for-the-fences literary ambition exhilarated and exasperated a reader in about equal measure—and it was inevitably appraised by some journalists in Great American Novel terms. Set mostly in the crumbled-norms New York of the mid- to late seventies, the book revolved around the tormented adult children of the rich Hamilton-Sweeney family. All of them, along with a vast array of characters in their orbit, were strobe-lit by Hallberg’s excellent attention to everything depraved and vital in the city of that era: impending budgetary doom; downtown’s skanky creativity; copious murders, both singular and serial; innumerable group liberations and personal traumas—all the phenomena that have left that time and place permanently subject to artistic awe and, in less dexterous hands, sentimentality.

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Hallberg made it his fictional business to render the city in punk bands, New Journalism, police gumshoeing, xeroxed zines, spray-painted graffiti, and municipal bonds. A large part of the author’s subject amounted to the sheer unity of things, whether it was human-engineered or simply fateful, propelled by a degree of coincidence that would make Dickens blush.

The book deserved most of the hype and some of the scorn it received; no one could deny its virtuosity, no matter how much it begged to be trimmed. Hallberg could never just let a phone ring, not when its ringing “seemed antique, somehow prematurely quaint, like the carillon of a village church slated for demolition.” Period references would be shoehorned in (an excitable teen-age boy has “to picture the wobble of President Ford’s jowls in order not to pop a full-blown bone”), and sentences occasionally wandered off into some private authorial sphere of meaning.

And yet the neologisms and catalogues and touches of lyricism more often than not excited readerly joy and writerly envy: a radio “played a big band song from before he was born, a slow, nostalgic, glimmering chandelier of a thing, around which a clarinet swooped and dove like a bird had got into the room.” The book was so complicatedly constructed that it could be regarded as the opposite of autofiction, though its aspiring-novelist character, Mercer Goodman, provided a self-conscious meta moment: his manuscript “kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it.” The same was true for Hallberg. The connectedness became so dense that the author’s starry special effects threatened to collapse into a black hole, a world so excessively imagined that it could barely keep spinning.

Can there be, for a novelist this exuberantly inventive, a sweet spot between the oblique, inferential “Field Guide” and the gigantic particle accelerator that was “City on Fire”? Maybe not, since the nature of this writer’s gifts seems irreconcilable with the very idea of middle ground. But that’s what he appears to be seeking in “The Second Coming,” only to wind up running too far away from the scope of his previous novel.

The book chronicles the attempts of Ethan Aspern—a onetime actor and twice-arrested drug addict—to reconnect with his barely teen-age daughter, Jolie. In 2011, while Ethan is trying to stay clean in California, Jolie, a progressively schooled New York City seventh grader, has already begun drinking vodka and has spent some time in a psych ward. A near-disastrous descent onto some subway tracks, initially made to retrieve a fallen smartphone, may also have included a sudden pursuit of suicidal opportunity. (The “second coming” of the novel’s title derives not from the Nicene Creed or Yeats but from an unlicensed Prince song that Jolie was about to select on her phone.)

At thirty-three, her father is a man-child who bears some resemblance to “City on Fire” ’s William Hamilton-Sweeney III. William tried but ultimately kept a reader’s patience, which may not extend quite so far or so long with Ethan, whose mother died from cancer while he was still in high school. He stole not only her prescription painkillers but also a piece of video art that she’d made, submitting it as his own creation when he applied to a theatre program at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. His perpetual backsliding is soundtracked throughout the novel by an ongoing and grandiose self-analysis.

Ethan’s “fantasies of reconciliation” with Jolie, the child of a youthful marriage, are fuelled by the narcissistic belief that Jolie truly needs him—no matter that when she was a baby he thought of her as a “passion project,” more a means to his own personal development than an end in herself. Jolie, as it happens, is also her own passion project. She understands that she and her father are “still bound together on some deep level: associative mind, surface soft-heartedness, uncontrollable urges, and secret self-loathing.” But, once Ethan returns to New York, “a scant twenty-four hours in his presence . . . disabused her of the notion that his walking out on her three years ago had been anything but a gift.”

Jolie may have the excuse of youth for her gratingly angsty behavior and pronouncements, her constant sense of others’ betrayal, but what her father’s former probation officer thinks of as “Ethan’s special brand of madness” seems decidedly off the shelf. At times, Hallberg invites readers to give up on his feckless protagonist, but one can’t escape a sense that the author himself is often hoodwinked by his character.

Throughout, Hallberg shuffles the chronological pack in the manner of episodic television drama, demoting the linear to enemy of the artistic. What amounts to an epilogue begins on the sixty-fifth page of the novel’s five hundred and eighty-six, an Ozempic reduction from the girth of “City on Fire.” The book’s climactic action takes place over Thanksgiving weekend, when Ethan, still on the East Coast on his rescue mission, violates custody arrangements by taking Jolie to a memorial service for his father in Ocean City, Maryland. Amber Alert-able calamity—and a father-daughter LSD trip—ensues. The novel briefly ponders “the distinction between substance and essence, quite possibly semantic, or even imaginary,” and that disparity, once it’s raised, inevitably starts to apply to the book itself, with its bravura attention to characters and complications that are less deep and more familiar than they ought to be.

The author’s spot-on wit remains playfully evident, letting us hear, for example, “what, on the northern fringes of Manhattan’s East Village on a Friday night in winter, passed for silence: ambulances screaming their heads off, housing-insecure pigeons winging darkly overhead.” Gloomy Jolie takes lingering notice of one teacher’s bookshelves because of their “umlauted authors and promises of disenchantment.” Hallberg can sink so happily into his own wordplay that a quirky coinage becomes standard: rather than being opened, a wallet is “unvelcro’d” four times in the course of the novel. The author’s dialogue remains satisfyingly implausible: a teen-age boy who goes to Putney isn’t really likely to say, “The very nature of narrative is to falsify, right? Smooth away the tensions, or whatever . . . make them photogenic, jack them into fantasy.” But Hallberg has made his choice, probably the right one, for dealing with this age-old authorial conundrum. We can’t expect him to hide his verbal light under every adolescent bushel just for the sake of verisimilitude. It is largely the same with Jolie and with the book’s renditions of her parents’ younger selves: everybody’s speech is somewhat heightened, and their thoughts, filtered through close third person, are amped up as well.

Still, readers have little chance to discern the social texture of 2011 while the characters are staring so deeply into themselves. We get a mention of the Tea Party and some glimpses of Occupy Wall Street, but “The Second Coming” is in no real way the kind of historical novel that “City on Fire” often successfully aspired to be. Hallberg has some fun Tom Wolfe-style chops (his New York Post headline for Jolie’s smartphone incident in the subway is “ APP-ETITE FOR DESTRUCTION! ”), but this is a book where the public and the political are constantly muffled in deference to the personal, the work of a virtuoso muralist forsaking murals for high-res miniatures. One wants an author of Hallberg’s particular talent for noticing to raise the blinds and look out the window, to give us the life and times of a culture instead of the compulsive repetitions of two individuals whose dynamic we grasp all too quickly.

In scaling back the DeLillo-like aspirations of “City on Fire,” Hallberg subsides into a kind of narrative stupor, falling past the thematic civics of Jonathan Franzen, almost all the way into the microscopy of Nicholson Baker’s early novels. At an especially tense moment, Ethan argues with his onetime probation officer out on the balcony of a motel in Ocean City, and Jolie retreats into the bathroom: “The rattling vent fan, in this context, was a blessing. So too the dripping tap, the wincingly uncinematic light above the mirror making plain that the maids hadn’t made it this far.”

There is still more to fiction than feelings. One wants Hallberg to overreach, but by zooming out once more instead of zooming in. If the great national novel is an absurdity, perhaps the great municipal one remains possible. Hallberg may be the writer who produces a truly encompassing book of fiction set in the time of 9/11 or of COVID , neither of which has yet been written. Either of them is more likely to end in failure than in complete success, but he is sufficiently supplied with talent to make the attempt, and, even after this latest novel, one does remember that risk is his middle name. ♦

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Monday is Memorial Day, when Americans pause to remember those who have lost their lives in the country’s wars, and if that somber occasion puts you in the mood to think about global politics and foreign policy, this would be a good weekend to settle in with “New Cold Wars,” in which my Times colleague David E. Sanger and his collaborator Mary K. Brooks evaluate the current state of tensions among China, Russia and America.

Elsewhere, we also recommend new fiction from Colm Tóibín, Juli Min and Monica Wood, along with a biography of the groundbreaking transgender actress Candy Darling and a book of photos by the incomparable Corky Lee, documenting moments in Asian American life. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

NEW COLD WARS: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks

In this compelling first draft of history, Sanger reveals how a generation of American officials have grappled with dangerous developments in great war competition, from the war in Ukraine to the technological arms race with China.

“Vividly captures the view from Washington. But, as Sanger makes clear, … the fate of the U.S.-led order rests more than ever on the ideas, beliefs and emotions of people far outside the Beltway.”

From Justin Vogt’s review

Crown | $33

LONG ISLAND Colm Tóibín

More than a decade after Tóibín introduced us to Eilis Lacey, the finely wrought Irish émigré heroine of his novel “Brooklyn,” he’s conjured her again, this time as a married mother whose suburban New York life is disrupted by a crisis that propels her back to Ireland once more.

“Eilis is hardly passive. She is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice. … In her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.”

From A.O. Scott’s review

Scribner | $28

SHANGHAILANDERS Juli Min

Min’s debut is a sweeping story, told in reverse. The novel opens in 2040 with the Yangs, a wealthy family tense with frustrations and troubles. Then the novel gradually moves backward to 2014, revealing along the way the complex lives of each family member and how they got to their anguished present.

“Having knowledge of these characters’ futures before we know about their past makes stumbling on their bygone days all the more touching.”

From Jean Kwok’s review

Spiegel & Grau | $28

HOW TO READ A BOOK Monica Wood

The latest from Wood (“When We Were the Kennedys”) brings together three lonely people in and around Portland, Maine — a retired teacher, a widower and a young woman recently released from prison — for a dextrous and warmhearted tale of unlikely redemption and connection.

“A charming, openhearted novel, deceptively easy to read but layered with sharp observations, hard truths and rich ideas.”

From Helen Simonson’s review

Mariner | $28

CANDY DARLING: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar Cynthia Carr

Carr, an astute guide to the Manhattan demimonde, offers a compassionate and meticulous biography of the transgender actress, who flitted in and out of Andy Warhol’s orbit before dying of cancer at 29 in 1974, after being immortalized in a famous photograph by Peter Hujar and in the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side.”

“There wasn’t really vocabulary to describe the territory Darling was exploring back then … and her biographer extends a sure hand across the breach. To push her from the Warhol wings to center stage, at a moment when transgender rights are in roiling flux, just makes sense.”

From Alexandra Jacobs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30

CORKY LEE’S ASIAN AMERICA: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice Photographs Corky Lee; edited by Chee Wang Ng and Mae Ngai

Several years after his death from Covid at age 73, the famed photographer’s work remains enduringly relevant. This new book, a sort of survey course in Asian Americans’ decades-long fight for social and political equality, offers both intimate, atomized portraits of the everyday and galvanizing visions of a larger unified movement.

“A man with an intimate understanding of the invisible, turning his lens on behind-the-scenes fragments and people that the annals of history have largely ignored.”

From Wilson Wong’s review

Clarkson Potter | $50

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