The Passenger

by Cormac McCarthy

Hardcover, 2022

Call number

FIC MCC

Publication

Knopf (2022), Edition: First Edition, 400 pages

Description

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, on sale December 6th, 2022 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit--by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member colligan

I should not be writing this review. Why? Either I've become too old to appreciate the work of a great author or that same great author (a favorite of mine) has written a work at which I can't help but fling invectives. Could be either or both I suppose.

Cormac McCarthy has been one of my favorite

authors and his literary skills are without question. Indeed he makes makes ample display of his "to be envied" style in "The Passenger".

Had I some degree of humility (not to mention good sense) I would stop here. As likely you should as well. On the other hand (like McCarthy himself), I'm at an age where both good sense and sensitivity to criticism are on the wane.

I'll give you the flavor of my reaction to "The Passenger" by sharing the three words that came most frequently to mind as I read. Self-indulgent, pretentious, and shallow.

Self-indulgent in the sense that it feels as though McCarthy is saying to himself "because I can write something I should". Much of the work while well-written, seem pointless. Not crucial to the plot, the characters, or life in general. "Look what I can write."

Pretentious in the sense that the author often seems to go into events, theories, and cultural styles (in length & detail) for no reason other than to let the reader know (via his characters) that he is savvy and worldly wise. At times the characters themselves appear bored and indifferent to the meanderings.

Shallow in the sense that the entire book seems to be posturing without substance. The reader frequently asks themselves " Where is this going and what is this all about." It's not so much puzzling as pointless.

This book is not post-modern. Haruki Murakami is post-modern. Laszlo Krasznahorkai is post-modern. If the book was meant to be post-modern, it didn't succeed.

I am aware that I haven't damaged either McCarthy's reputation or reader's appreciation of this work. My strong reaction is likely based on my feelings of disappointment. I bought a new hardbound copy of the work at full retail price (a thing I never do) solely on my respect for McCarthy. I sat back expecting to slowly relish the crowning achievement of one of my favorite authors. My disappointment slowly morphed into anger.

To put myself in a more realistic state of mind I recalled a scene from the very old TV series MASH. Radar O'Reilly (a simple enlisted man) berates Hawkeye Pierce (a surgeon in a Korean War combat area hospital) for performing surgery whilst either intoxicated or at a minimum hungover. Radar doesn't fail to let Hawkeye know how disappointed he is in one of the people he esteemed. Hawkeye's response is both cutting and accurate. Hawkeye doesn't do surgeries for Radar, Radar's expectations do not dictate his behaviors, and Radar needs to focus on himself and not others. I will mull over that scene.

This review has gone on way too long. And, I can't use the excuse of being "in my cups". Sadly, stone cold sober. Just old and crabby.

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LibraryThing member BeauxArts79

There's a temptation to give this book much more credit than it deserves. I had hoped to get away with never reading the final work of a favorite though aged writer. I sensed that his closeness to the grave and the vast silence since his last publication would combine to create an atmosphere of

exceptional yet unreachable expectation. The richness of prose that I love about BM or AtPH or even TR is not to be found here. There is such an overemphasis on dialogue, in fact, that it might as well be a script. Here, I don't even pick up on McCarthy's typical genius for providing a vivid sense of time, place, and character; most of the dialogue is generic, perfunctory, static. Indeed, some of the conversations seem to be recycled (e.g. Western's exchanges with Josie) and, again, the novel just feels like it is pedaling in place. The hallucinations become cartoonish, so even the most haunted character ceases to be compelling. McCarthy gives us Quentin and Caddie vibes, but Western and Alicia are flatter, less sympathetic. The numerous secondary characters float into the narrative with inconsequential brevity. And the fetishization of suicide that peeks out at us from the pages of The Road is on fuller display here; the deceased is treated by McCarthy as some oracular figure, a guru martyred by her demons. It's as if her suicide is meant to give her philosophical bona fides. It's just creepy. I realize this is one installment of a diptych, but Proust rendered us the kindness of volumes that stand up well individually.

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LibraryThing member brianinbuffalo

I admit that it feels like literary blasphemy to assign a 2-star rating to the long-awaited work of a Pulitzer Prize-winner regarded by many as one of America’s greatest living authors. Having loved McCarthy’s last novel 16 years ago (“The Road”), I eagerly awaited my turn in the library

queue for “The Passenger.” To put it bluntly: I hated it. It was one of only a handful of books within the past couple years that I stopped reading about two-thirds of the way through. I can do “weird” if the plot is riveting and the characters are relatable. “The Passenger” didn’t work for me at any level. The humor seemed contrived. The storyline was meandering. The only thing that stopped me from assigning 1 star to this tome is McCarthy’s undeniable skill as a word merchant. What are the chances of me reading the second installment? Zero.

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LibraryThing member fuzzy_patters

This is a difficult review because this book is a beautiful mess. Some of the writing is beautiful, but part of it is frustrating such as one particular conversation between two characters that felt like a writer having a rhetorical conversation with himself. Parts of this book left me asking big

questions about what McCarthy was asking us and the nature of life and why we are here, which I think makes for great literature. Yet, there are also a lot of unanswered plot questions that are frustrating, but maybe that is the point. We are all here going through life and searching for meaning, but there is always something missing. Maybe the unanswered plot points are the point. I'm unsure. If definitely left me thinking after I finished it, which is a good thing, but it also left me frustrated, which may have been intentional on McCarthy's part. Hopefully, Stella Maris, which I haven't read yet, will help clarify things.

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LibraryThing member nancyadair

Decades ago, I picked up my first Cormac McCarthy book, Child of God. It was disturbing. It was gorgeous. It blew my mind. I read the Border Trilogy as it came out, and all his subsequent novels. His style always made me swoon. They are dark novels, and thought-provoking. I was thrilled to receive

a finished copy of The Passenger.

What a strange experience it is. You travel between two realities. There is the stunningly beautiful child genius Alicia Western’s last days, visited and cajoled by beings arising from her mental illness. And her brother Bobby Western, haunted by his beloved Alicia, pursued by unknown men who think he has something they want, and who travels deeper into alienation and solitude. Alice accomplished her longed for demise, but Bobby only longs for it.

While Alicia’s visitations from the Thalidomide Kid are filled with absurd conversations filled with malaprops, Western’s friends expound upon big ideas and theories. There is a long passage about physics that made me blurry eyed, and another probing theories about the Kennedy assignation. Frankly, The Kid was more entertaining with his snarky attitude and colorful misuse of language. But, Western’s friends also probe the existential. “The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it,” one acquaintance tells Western. “Once you accept that idea then the idea that all this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.” Which, in effect, means it will be a tragedy, for no one will be left to name it as such. Even the role of the writer is commented on by Western’s friend John Sheldon: “…any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world–which was their author’s true desire…The legacy of the word is a fragile thing for all its power.”

The later part of the novel finds Western hiding from men who have already ransacked his apartment, confiscated his car, and closed his banking account. He has no idea what he has done or what they want. In the opening chapters, Western was part of a diving team that found a downed airplane with anomalies no one can explain. His father worked on the Manhattan Project. His sister had mathematical problems solved only in her head. If any hold secrets the men are pursing is unknown. One man even asked Western if he believed in aliens.

As the novel veers away from conversations and people, with Western alone in the landscape, the writing becomes beautiful, if stark.

“In the end you can escape everything but yourself,” Sheldon had told Western. Alicia could not escape her illness and her love for her older brother, except in death. Western can not escape his grief for the loss of the love of his life.

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book. My review is fair and unbiased.

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LibraryThing member davidroche

A huge amount of hype surrounds Cormac McCarthy’s latest two books and I grabbed the lengthier novel The Passenger (Picador). It’s full of McCarthy’s fantastic descriptive writing but I just couldn’t quite get my head around it. I accept this may well be my fault rather than the author’s

but my impression was of being bounced all over the place in a way that didn’t make me admire the creativity but left me disoriented and uncomfortable. The blurb on the jacket described salvage divers finding that one of the passengers on a sunken plane had gone missing along with the black box and this drew me in. I found this very misleading however - not only did the story didn’t meander but ping-ponged into schizophrenia, unpleasantly portrayed thalidomide cartoon characters, and philosophy debates, and the opening basic premise was never resolved. I’m sure both McCarthy’s hardcore fans and other readers far more erudite than myself may disagree, and The Guardian’s review described it as ‘one of the greatest American novels of this or any other time.’ What do I know?

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LibraryThing member browner56

It is 1980 in New Orleans and Bobby Western is dealing with two big problems in his life. Above all, he still grieves the suicide death of his sister Alicia, with whom he had a complicated emotional relationship, to say the least. Beyond that, Bobby, trained as a physicist but now working as a

deep-sea salvage diver, has just taken a job that puts him in considerable peril: a plane has mysteriously crashed and rests at the bottom of the Gulf. Bobby and his partner enter the sealed plane and find the flight recorder and one of the passengers to be missing. Shortly afterwards, Bobby becomes entangled in a conspiracy by government agents who do not believe that he had nothing to do with the passenger’s disappearance. After his partner dies in an unexplained manner, Bobby’s life begins to unravel and he eventually decides to flee the country, living out his days with an assumed identity on an island off the coast of Spain.

To say that summarizes the basic plot of The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in sixteen years, is at once accurate and highly misleading. Indeed, it is not clear that the plot is even what the author intended the book to be about; that much is evident from how the intriguing setup involving the missing passenger from a sunken plane is quickly abandoned and never resolved. Instead, what the reader gets is a moving, if essentially bleak, character study reconstructing Bobby’s life, as well as several lengthy passages involving his sister’s mental health struggles that eventually led to her demise. (Telling Alicia’s story in more detail is the apparent purpose of a companion novel, Stella Maris, which is also the name of the psychiatric hospital where she dies.) Along the way, McCarthy includes substantial interludes to consider such additional topics as quantum mechanics, the nuclear holocaust (Bobby and Alicia’s father worked with Oppenheimer in developing the atomic bomb), the relationship between man and God, and even an alternative theory about who killed John F. Kennedy!

So, what should we make of The Passenger? To be sure, this novel has some of the underlying themes that mark all of McCarthy’s work, such as protagonists who struggle to understand forces that are beyond their control. And, of course, the writing remains as splendid and insightful as ever, particularly in the many descriptive scenes and conversational episodes the book contains. However, readers expecting to find the author’s vintage Western work (Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses) or something from his Southern Gothic period (Suttree) are likely to be a little disappointed here. Also, those of us who had come to accept that the post-apocalyptic vision in The Road was the author’s final statement may be somewhat confused as to the ultimate message of this book, which contains so many disparate threads. Nevertheless, for his ability to still challenge us with compelling and provocative ideas, this is a writer who continues to merit our attention.

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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

Cormac McCarthy has written a pair of novels that are being released just months apart. Years ago, I was given a complete set of this author's works and have felt the weight of them waiting for me to get to them ever since, which is why I picked up the first of these new novels instead. Let me tell

you that the first third of The Passenger was fantastic. I was kicking myself for not reading him sooner, I was posting about the book on twitter and telling friends how good it was. And then, as the novel continued and left the promise of the first chapters behind, growing ever flabbier and more discursive, my enthusiasm waned and eventually I finished this book only through sheer force of will.

The beginning of the novel had plot, it had tension, it was going places. And then this was all forgotten in favor of the protagonist wandering around, thinking about math and various topics. I expect that the kind of person who will love this book is someone who likes long, rambling conversations about math and who has a hardcover edition of [Infinite Jest] on their bookshelf. I am not that person.

The writing in this novel is very, very good. I get why McCarthy has the reputation he has. He knows how to put a sentence together. He's also terrible at writing women. There's one actual manic pixie dream girl -- literally a beautiful younger girlwoman who is mentally ill and brilliant and conveniently dead for the protagonist to long for, and the rest of the women in this entire novel are contemptible sex objects, with especial vitriol saved for those over thirty, with imperfect bodies or less than docile personalities. The author pulls no punches when it comes to the way the characters in this novel speak about women. Yes, the book takes place in the 1980s among a group of men deeply invested in their own masculinity, but even so, I have rarely encountered such dedicated misogyny in a novel. It was a lot.

So I'm going to skip the companion novel.

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LibraryThing member kcshankd

Still digesting a week later. I am going to have to re-read, especially for the dialogues.

I am not sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it.

Sitting with it a while.

LibraryThing member santhony

So, I read Blood Meridian recently, a number of years after having read and thoroughly enjoyed the Border Trilogy and The Road. While I did not enjoy Blood Meridian nearly as much, there is no question that it contained large sections of stunningly descriptive writing. McCarthy recently released

this novel (the first of a pair) and I elected to take it on.

McCarthy is, quite simply, the most descriptive writer I’ve ever been exposed to. However, as in Blood Meridian, I found some sections hard to follow. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy pens long paragraphs in Spanish, with no translation of what is being said. In The Passenger, he goes off on a 6-8 page exposition on the subject of complex physics, which I promise you, not one person in 10,000 could possibly hope to understand.

It raises the question, “how did he write it.” I don’t think that he is a physicist. I’ve got to think the text is accurate. Did he school himself sufficiently in particle physics to pen the dialogue?

He also frequently has many pages of back-and-forth dialogue (excellently written) that ultimately becomes confusing when trying to figure out which character is speaking.

The story follows a character named Bobby Western, something of a loner/wanderer who stumbles across something that places him in great danger. A second thread deals with his sister, Alicia, a paranoid schizophrenic. McCarthy’s accounts of her hallucinations are masterful.

In any event, Bobby is on the run, from whom and from what is never fully explained. His father was a contemporary of Oppenheimer and this is touched upon from time to time. There is an absolutely brilliant conversation concerning the Kennedy assassination.

As in Blood Meridian, McCarthy displays flashes of brilliance, at others is borderline unreadable. In the end, the good outweighs the bad.

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LibraryThing member Ailurophile

The Passenger is a very deftly written book, but also a very strange one. Although the plot and characters easily held my interest throughout, this novel is also filled with deeper meanings lurking behind its sly symbolism. This is serious literary fiction, not simply an intriguing mystery story.

On a single reading, I remain puzzled as to who the missing tenth passenger from the sunken business jet might have been. I likewise am uncertain who the shadow figures who seached Western’s lodgings and otherwise complicated his life were. That they were some sort of government operatives seemed likely, but why were they so interested in a college dropout turned salvage diver, even if his father had been a physicist working on nuclear weapons? Given that Western’s younger sister’s schizophrenia, complete with hallucinated figures staging perplexing vaudeville acts for her under the direction of the presumably equally hallucinated “Thalidomide Kid”, and given that at one point, the Kid appears to Western as well, I speculate the government agents Western believes are watching him may themselves be merely a delusion on his part. As for his bank account being attached by the IRS – well, that could easily simply have been the IRS finally catching entirely by themselves to the fact that he had inherited a substantial amount from his grandmother on which he had never paid any taxes.
The book had many quirks. It was filled with interesting new vocabulary, often very specialized terms from fields as diverse as automobile racing and quantum physics. But I also noticed a pronounced tendency to run two words together, and to omit apostrophes from contractions, thus “sockfeet”, “don’t”, “isnt” and so forth. I am not certain what the significance of this might be. For me, it imparts a strange dreamlike sense to the world about which I am reading, which perhaps goes along with the possibility that many of the things that protagonist Bobby Western believes he is experiencing may in fact be partly or largely delusional. But perhaps I am overthinking the idea that Western may have schizophrenia. Certainly the book also depicts characters pondering the unknowable nature of reality, of truth, and similar big topics, which philosophers classically cannot leave alone.

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LibraryThing member thewanderingjew

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy, author; MacLoed Andrews, Julia Whelan, narrators
Bobby Western and his sister Alicia/Alice had an illicit love for each other which condemned them both to live a life of misery. Mental illness complicated Alice’s life early on, and also complicated Bobby’s, though

much later on. She was the smarter of the two, regarding math and numbers, but he was the more stable. Neither fulfilled their intellectual promise because of circumstances they created, that may or may not have been beyond their control. However, they made choices that altered the trajectory of their lives.
The Passenger is about Bobby and, of course, it includes memories and anecdotes about his sister, Alicia. I read Stella Maris first. It was probably a mistake, since it colored and complicated my comprehension of “The Passenger”. I advise readers to read “The Passenger” first, as was intended by the author. Stella Maris is about Alicia and her inability to live in the real world. She is so bright, but she understands she has an affliction that she is unable to control, nor does she seem to want to control it. She disregards her medications because she dreads their side effects. Without them, she has visions/hallucinations, which are very real to her. She is brighter than her doctors, so bright that the world disappoints her. She doesn’t desire life. She is in love with her brother.
Bobby is older than she is, and he is wiser in his own way. Her mental challenges pain him. At first, he makes decisions based on common sense and proper decorum. After he leaves school and stops studying physics, he finds a pot of gold, courtesy of his grandmother. He shares it with his sister, who was only 16. She buys a valuable violin. Bobby, who was only in his early 20’s, and Alicia had both given up their studies. Their attempt to further their education disappointed them. The educators could not satisfy their needs. Bobby becomes a race car driver, and then he becomes a deep-sea diver for a recovery company. Alicia falters and eventually goes to Stella Maris, presumably to escape from her reality and to get help.
Meanwhile, after a dive to search a submerged plane, Bobby and his partner discover something is missing from the plane and so is a passenger. That, and his father’s past, seems to haunt him, and although he seems to have no idea why, it puts him on the FBI’s list for investigation. Then he suddenly is investigated by the IRS, as well, since his lifestyle doesn’t comport with his income. He is forced to make decisions he may regret. He seemingly has no idea why these events have put him in this nefarious spotlight, but he has to escape. Both Bobby and Alicia eventually find themselves in situations in which they have no control and which greatly and negatively impact their lives. They are always running away. Their grief and loneliness haunt them without resolution.
Bobby rejected his incestuous feelings for his sister while she embraced hers. She wanted them to live together. He refused and carried a torch his entire life for his forbidden love. At one point in Bobby’s life, after Alicia is no longer present, he has a vision. He has his own hallucination of one of her “imaginary” friends that she has told him about. The kid, a result of the fertility drug thalidomide, comes to visit him too. Did the “imaginary” guests help them both to deal with their shame about their affection for each other, their guilt about their father’s work to develop the bomb, their shared dissatisfaction with the way their lives turned out. Could there have been another healthier outcome?
Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. His sentence structure is easy to follow, but his narrative demands that the reader think and not read mindlessly. There are so many philosophical questions raised that demand answers, and I don't pretend to have the answers, or to have understood every concept presented, or to have known every name raised in this book, but I enjoyed reading it as it made me really contemplate my own life and aspirations, my own decisions and their outcomes. Still, the time line moved back and forth and the characters also bounced back and forth, which made it a little harder to follow. I felt like Bobby and Alicia, who were trapped by the system, the one within their own minds and the one within the outside world with all of its bureaucracy and rules.
Have you ever been in that position? Have I ever been in that position? Yes, at times. I think we are all forced to make choices based on the world in which we live, even if it hurts us, and the company Amazon, has trapped me in a hopeless situation, regarding book reviews, without any recourse. However, that is a tale for another time. We are all in danger from the power of the government’s bureaucracy and the power of the bureaucracy of private and public companies, in our private and public lives. The book’s message to me is that we had all better start to pay more attention to our lives and our place in the world around us.
This book is so creative; it will excite every reader’s imagination. One reviewer, James Wood of the New Yorker, likened the characters to passengers traveling on life’s journey, which is pertinent to the very title of the book. It seemed to me to be a very astute observation.

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LibraryThing member rmarcin

While the writing is amazing, this book is strange. It is told by two characters, Alicia and Bobby. Alicia is Bobby's younger sister, by about 10 years. She is schizophrenic and sees The Kid, dwarves, and more. She is a mathematical genius, in college at 13. Bobby is a salvage diver who is hired to

explore a plane wreckage where he realizes there is something and someone missing. The book follows Bobby as he is questioned about this, as well as his wealth and his life. Bobby is devastated about the suicide of his sister, and can't get over it. Bobby and Alicia were in love.
A bizarre book. I hope there are answers in book 2.

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LibraryThing member Dianekeenoy

I found this book tedious to read. Decided to listen on audio, the narrators were amazing so I was able to finish this book. Cormac McCarthy is an incredible writer but this book was not enjoyable for me.

LibraryThing member jwhenderson

PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI, 1980 Bobby Western jumps from the Coast Guard tender into the dark at three in the morning after zipping up his wet suit jacket. Nine people are still fastened in their seats, with hair floating and eyes empty of speculation, when his dive light illuminates the sunken

jet. The tenth passenger, the black box of the aircraft, and the pilot's flight bag are all missing from the crash site. Yet how? Western is haunted in body and spirit by men with badges, the ghost of his father, the man who created the atomic bomb that burned glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and his sister, who is both his soul's love and its ruin. Western is a collateral witness to plots that can only lead to his injury.

It is Alicia, his sister, who is the most interesting, yet curiously difficult to understand as she has conversations with hallucinatory images. The story explores a plethora of ideas , centered on the nature of mathematics and the limits of using words to describe the world. This leads one to wonder about the nature of literature itself and the reason we tell stories.

The Passenger is a magnificent narrative about morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the insanity that is human awareness that traverses the American South, from the boisterous bars of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Florida. It also instills in the reader a desire to read its companion volume, Stella Maris.

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LibraryThing member Al-G

This book is very much Cormac McCarthy, but a very different McCarthy from many of his earlier works. In typical McCarthy fashion itis peopled with unusual and compelling characters and carries a plot that leaves the reader with as many questions as answers. Bobby Western is a physics dropout from

Caltech who has been a race car driver (until a crash ended that career) and now is a professional diver. He is haunted by the ghosts of his parents who worked at Los Alamos, his father a physicist, and his sister, Alicia, a brilliant but schizophrenic math genius who took her own lift. Bobby and his partner Oiler make a dive on a downed plane to open the novel. They find nine passengers with no black box in a scene that Bobby believes to look staged. A short time later mysterious federal agents interview him and claim there were ten passengers on the plane and want to know about the missing passenger. This is the beginning of trouble for him. Bobby's life quickly unravels as his yearns for the sister who he was in love with and for friends who have passed away. The book does not have the typical McCarthy violence and action but is rather much more philosophical and reflective. I believe the title and the missing passenger on the plan to be very much an allegory for Bobby and his life. This is a very introspective book and should give the reader pause as it asks us to consider hard questions about our lives and whether or not we are the missing passenger in them.

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LibraryThing member Dabble58

Whew. A slog. I wearied of the no-punctuation/dialogue tags and was distinctly grumpy about it until I realized it was a masterful ploy to make the reader slow down, feel confused, add uncertainty. So so clever for this disturbing book.

That said, much of the book seemed to be rants about pet

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LibraryThing member Dabble58

subjects- I particularly could have done without the lengthy section on the Kennedy assassination. It is never explained why the feds are following Western- and his road trip is written out in such detail with entire paragraphs given to opening a rucksack, for example, that I felt this was more of a self-aggrandizement project than a story.

I’m not a fan of his work in general- far too needlessly dark and violent for me- but there were things I quite loved in the book- phrases that grabbed at my heart, the undercurrent of grief, the descriptions of underwater salvage, etc. Too much time spent walking along beaches or sitting and contemplating man’s existence for me. Especially since the discussion was so unrelentingly grim.

People on this discussion seem to hurl abuse at people who don’t like the book… please don’t bother. We are all entitled to our opinions.

Merged review:

Whew. A slog. I wearied of the no-punctuation/dialogue tags and was distinctly grumpy about it until I realized it was a masterful ploy to make the reader slow down, feel confused, add uncertainty. So so clever for this disturbing book.

That said, much of the book seemed to be rants about pet subjects- I particularly could have done without the lengthy section on the Kennedy assassination. It is never explained why the feds are following Western- and his road trip is written out in such detail with entire paragraphs given to opening a rucksack, for example, that I felt this was more of a self-aggrandizement project than a story.

I’m not a fan of his work in general- far too needlessly dark and violent for me- but there were things I quite loved in the book- phrases that grabbed at my heart, the undercurrent of grief, the descriptions of underwater salvage, etc. Too much time spent walking along beaches or sitting and contemplating man’s existence for me. Especially since the discussion was so unrelentingly grim.

People on this discussion seem to hurl abuse at people who don’t like the book… please don’t bother. We are all entitled to our opinions.

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LibraryThing member bookomaniac

I had hoped that McCarthy's penultimate work would help me reconcile with the writer. It might just be me, but apart from The Road, none of his previous books appealed to me. And here too it didn't work: the sometimes absurd dialogues, the tough talk among men (who the hell still writes about the

Vietnam War?), the treatise-like passages about theoretical physics, the banal descriptive scenes of successive actions, ..., no I just don't like his style. And then the attempt at suspense about the missing passenger from the plane that crashed into the sea: it did not exceed the level of a cheap action movie. In short, too much fuss about too little substance. That pretty much sums up my McCarthy experience.

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LibraryThing member GarySeverance

Bobby Western is a self-made man, a living product of a family of gifted individuals. His father was a physicist who worked with theoretical physicist Oppenheimer on the development of the atomic bomb. Bobby became an underwater salvage diver rather than following in his fathers footsteps. His

reclusive younger sister is an individual with many gifts in the mathematics areas but is incapable of eliminating the self limitations of her own mental demons.

The novel begins with a Tour de force of some of the great ideas in the history of mathematics, the foundation of physics. McCarthy uses his Bobby’s dialog with friends during a mysterious salvage operation to explore the way numbers simulate the mysteries of the physical world. The Passenger is like one of Pynchon’s novels in that the reader can learn about complex math through the descriptions of brilliant people who have spent their lives trying to understand, predict, and control the world.

Bobby and his sister understand the math mechanics of physics to such an extent that they share a language and intuition unique to them. They become closer as they age and deteriorate until a forbidden boundary is crossed.

The down to earth story about bobby's involvement as a the deep sea diver exploring a downed aircraft with a missing passenger is exciting and the dialogue involved in the mystery is like that of characters in Elmore Leonard’s novels. McCarthy makes the connection between Bobby’s explorations of the philosophical and physical worlds like Oppenheimer’s idea that both the man of action and the man of science live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. McCarthy wrote that “Auschwitz and Hiroshima sealed forever the fate of the world.”

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LibraryThing member thiscatsabroad

I wanted to love this so much - & I partially did. But just partially. McCarthy´s prose is wondrously soul-bruising, but I found the narrative´s odd tangents - its forays into quantum physics, for example, both self-indulgent and over the top, compelling me to skim much of it. Perhaps that says

more about me than him.

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LibraryThing member patl

Absolutely stunning writing, and I have no idea what I just read. This novel rewards careful analytical reading.. which I didn’t do this time through. Probably reader error more than author error, but I’m baffled.

Fewer