Review of THE PASSENGER
Brilliant, disturbing, difficult ... Cormac's beautiful jeremiad.
Cormac McCarthy waited a long time to write this novel and its twin sister, Stella Maris. He is old. After reading The Passenger, I felt like I had read a goodbye of sorts. There is a profound elegiac feel to this utterly original and often alienating novel. Cormac is saying goodbye both personally and, I suspect, for all of us ruinously wondrous human beings. This novel takes no prisoners. It is an honest act of writing with no social agenda or any of the precious bullshit that infects so much of our fiction today. It is a God-less metaphysical missile.
Many will turn away from this fictionalized treatment of the son and daughter of the bomb’s most famous and most haunted creator, Robert Oppenheimer. The daughter’s italicized presence punctuates the novel throughout, representing maybe a quarter of its length. Stella Maris is her book – a nonstop ride through her suicidal mental illness. In The Passenger, she acts as a doppelganger to her brother’s adventures at sea, on land and in restaurants and bars throughout New Orleans. Hers is the madness of an internal world of conversations with hallucinogenic companions while his is one startling conversation after another with actual people living on the edge of a bankrupt world.
This is a serious book. It takes a bit to get used to the sister’s world. There is no underlying plot except the relationship between a brother and a sister too brilliant for this world. The names are hard to keep track of, there is a bunch of hard science, and you find yourself retracing your steps. But … it is worth it. Cormac’s gift for dialogue is literally shocking. Both hilarious and tragic, the conversations that mark this novel are the most remarkable I have read – maybe ever.
I believe this is his great novel. It is sad that the Nobel Committee will ignore this American renegade. No doubt his work will outlive the Nobel’s current short list. I feel that his too often inconsistent but also too often brilliant works are the product of a modern-day Melville. Melville’s madness both created and informed works that captured the insanity we were too close to to recognize. Cormac McCarthy’s extreme idiosyncratic place in our literary pantheon suggests a similar terrible awareness. Read this book – some of it out loud – and let it germinate.
The Passenger
Cormac McCarthy
2022 393 pages