May 1, 2022
National treasure McCarthy returns with a two-volume work being released over two months. In The Passenger, opening in 1980 Mississippi, a salvage diver now fears the water's depths and a conspiracy he doesn't understand, wishing he were dead yet not at peace with God. In Stella Maris, Alicia Western, a 20-year-old doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, checks into a hospital in 1972 Wisconsin after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and wonders at our insistence on shared experience, shot through with the beauties of physics and philosophy, while fearing for a brother beyond her reach.
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June 27, 2022
McCarthy returns 16 years after his Pulitzer-winning The Road with a rich story of an underachieving salvage diver in 1980 New Orleans, the first in a two-volume work. Bobby Western, son of a nuclear physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, is tasked with investigating a private plane crash in the Gulf. The plane’s crew is dead, the black box is missing, and one passenger is unaccounted for. Soon, agents of the U.S. government begin to harass Western and his coworker, then this colleague turns up dead. This thriller narrative is intertwined with the story of Western’s sister, Alicia, a mathematical genius who had schizophrenia and died by suicide. In flashbacks of Alicia’s hallucinations, vaudevillian characters perform for her—most notably, a character named the Thalidomide Kid. Alicia and the Kid engage in numerous conversations about arcane philosophy, theology, and physics—staples of the philosopher-tramps, vagabonds, and sociopaths of McCarthy’s canon, though their presence doesn’t feel quite as thematically grounded as they do in his masterworks. Still, he dazzles with his descriptions of a beautifully broken New Orleans: “The rich moss and cellar smell of the city thick on the night air. A cold and skullcolored moon.... At times the city seemed older than Nineveh.” The book’s many pleasures will leave readers aching for the final installment.
December 16, 2022
The Passenger, McCarthy's first effort since 2006's The Road and part of a brand-new duology alongside sister novel Stella Maris, first surprises in seeming to tilt toward more conventional narrative scaffolding than the author has before employed. The novel follows Bobby Western, a salvage diver whose latest job results in a mystery surrounding the titular character. But McCarthy, arguably our preeminent chronicler of existence's horror and cruel apathy, immediately subverts the arc he sets up--after all, to "solve" a mystery would be about as far from McCarthy works, which trade in life's essential unknowability, as it gets--instead spinning his slippery narrative out into the vastness of existential consideration and sending his latest haunted man on something of a directionless odyssey. Bobby seems to be simultaneously moving toward and away from the absences that define his life, and the particulars are patiently doled out and precisely planted, with a sense of immensity gradually building from the constellation of seemingly minor moments. And all of this is activated by the soon-to-be nonagenerian's still spry pen, his facility with brutal but poetic dialogue and dazzling, dense swaths of description on vibrant display. VERDICT The Passenger is proof that McCarthy still has plenty in the tank, and if it doesn't quite rise to the heights of his finest work, it's certainly his strangest. It's a thrill to find the author still making such beguiling moves.--Luke Gorham
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Starred review from August 15, 2022
A beguiling, surpassingly strange novel by the renowned--and decidedly idiosyncratic--author of Blood Meridian (1982) and The Road (2006). "He's in love with his sister and she's dead." He is Bobby Western, as described by college friend and counterfeiter John Sheddan. Western doesn't much like the murky depths, but he's taken a job as a salvage diver in the waters around New Orleans, where all kinds of strange things lie below the surface--including, at the beginning of McCarthy's looping saga, an airplane complete with nine bloated bodies: "The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation." Ah, but there were supposed to be 10 aboard, and now mysterious agents are after Western, sure that he spirited away the 10th--or, failing that, some undisclosed treasure within the aircraft. Bobby is a mathematical genius, though less so than his sister, whom readers will learn more about in the companion novel, Stella Maris. Alicia, in the last year of her life, is in a distant asylum, while Western is evading those agents and pondering not just mathematical conundrums, but also a tortured personal history as the child of an atomic scientist who worked at Oak Ridge to build the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's all vintage McCarthy, if less bloody than much of his work: Having logged time among scientists as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, he's now more interested in darting quarks than exploding heads. Still, plenty of his trademark themes and techniques are in evidence, from conspiracy theories (Robert Kennedy had JFK killed?) and shocking behavior (incest being just one category) to flights of beautiful language, as with Bobby's closing valediction: "He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue." Enigmatic, elegant, extraordinary: a welcome return after a too-long absence.
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Starred review from September 15, 2022
Bobby Western is a salvage diver afraid of the deep. Once a physics prodigy, he was smart enough to know he wasn't smart enough, unlike his father, who helped Oppenheimer develop the atomic bomb. The real genius of the family, however, was Bobby's late sister, Alicia, a schizophrenic math wizard prone to hallucinations and madly in love with her brother. While working on a job involving a small plane crash, Bobby and his partner discover one of the passengers is missing, along with the black box. Bobby is intrigued by the mystery until he becomes the target of a shadowy investigation. Plot is secondary to McCarthy's expert exploration of each character's interiority, plumbing the depths of their subconscious. Each chapter begins with an italicized lead-in depicting one of Alicia's hallucinations, a chilling and masterly conceit. McCarthy also considers such topics as postwar physics, race cars, underwater salvage, and the JFK assassination that subtly deepen the enigmatic narrative. His prose frequently approaches the Shakespearean, ranging from droll humor to the rapid-fire spouting of quotable fecundity. Dialogues click into place like a finely tuned engine. McCarthy has somehow added a new register to his inimitable voice. Long ensconced in the literary firmament, McCarthy further bolsters his claim for the Mount Rushmore of the literary arts.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Excitement is running high for McCarthy's first novel since The Road (2006), and readers will also be on alert for a second, linked novel, Stella Maris, due in December.
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