Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” Review

In his first novel since his 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Road”, Cormac McCarthy delivers a novel focused on grief, family and the nuclear era

BY MATTHEW ZEICHERT

In many literary circles, Cormac McCarthy is celebrated as the greatest-living American novelist. In other circles, McCarthy is maligned for the way he blatantly disregards quotation marks. Regardless, the 89-year-old author of “No Country for Old Men” returns from a 16 year literary hiatus with a 400+ page novel that has ‘McCarthyites’ running to bookstores nationwide. 

“The Passenger” will not win over readers who despise McCarthy’s writing style. Despite this, he does surprise readers in more ways than one with the first novel of his 2022 duology. With McCarthy’s “Stella Maris” expected to arrive in bookstores by early December, “The Passenger” serves as an introduction to the characters/world that “Stella Maris” also inhabits. 

Although he is not the titular character, Bobby Western serves as the main character of “The Passenger”. Western is a man who wears many hats throughout the novel, but much of the story’s plot revolves around his job as a commercial diver. When underwater and above ground, Bobby Western struggles to come to terms with the tragic death of his beloved sister, Alicia. As struggles fueled by Alicia’s death arise in Bobby’s life, the novel is reminded too, as Alicia’s perspective bleeds in. 

In flashback chapters, Alicia Western is best described as a person living on a plane of mathematical existence. Much of Alicia’s dialogue is with a mysterious figure known as The Kid. With a patchy beard and flippers for hands, The Kid exists as an extraterrestrial, but he may simply be a figment of the Westerns’ collective  imagination. The Alicia storyline allows McCarthy to play around with an entirely new concept for his literary canon: mathematics. 

In a recent interview with David Krakauer, McCarthy used his hour long interview to talk about… physics? Yes, rather than reveal the meanings of perplexing novels such as “Blood Meridian” and “Child of God,” the reclusive author keeps the secrets of his works to himself. 

. “The Passenger” juggles many ideas all at once. How can an author go on horrifying tangents about nuclear physics, complex family dynamics, and the five stages of grief in one novel? That author is Cormac McCarthy: THAT’S HOW! 

The less one knows about “The Passenger” before reading it the better. Although the new McCarthy novel does not utilize linear storytelling, numerous plot points are best left for the reader to discover on their own time. Discovering what McCarthy’s prose represents is a long, yet rewarding process. A quick google search reveals that “The Passenger” is receiving raving reviews from national newspapers, all while being bashed by literary bloggers. McCarthy undoubtedly knows this is par for the course when releasing a soon-to-be New York Times bestselling book. 

It’s impossible to know what impact “The Passenger” will have on the literary canon decades from now, but it is clear that  with “The Passenger,” Cormac McCarthy gives credence to the quality over quantity school of thought.