Title: The Passenger
Rating: 5 Stars
You probably have to be a certain age to get my blog title. For those lucky enough to not be of a certain (advanced) age, Jack LaLanne was the first person that tried to get America into shape. He had a daily television show that ran from 1951 to 1986. It would be just himself and his wife doing very basic exercises. I remember watching him growing up. He continued even as he grew older. In his 60s and his 70s, he continued to perform feats of strengths. One of his favorite stunts was to, while handcuffed and shackled, tow some significant number of rowboats (containing people) for distances of up to a mile. He lived to be 96. He exercised right up to the day before he died.
This brings us to Cormac McCarthy. At the age of 89, he just released a truly remarkable novel unlike his previous work.
Before I talk about The Passenger, let’s talk a bit about Cormac McCarthy. He published his first novel way back in 1965. For decades, he toiled in obscurity, beloved by a few literary critics and literature professors. Some of that lack of mainstream success might have had to do with his subject matter and style.
First of all, his style can be difficult to read. He eschews most punctuation. Hilariously, he has apparently never used a semi-colon, considering it “idiocy”. Many of his novels contain untranslated Spanish. He loves to use long gone, antiquated words. If his works fit in anywhere, they could best be described as Westerns, a genre that hasn’t garnered a great deal of respect. Finally, there’s the subject matter. In Child of God, we’re introduced to Lester Ballard, an alienated necrophiliac. In Blood Meridian (considered his magnum opus and one of the great novels of the second half of the twentieth century), you have horrifying, graphic depictions of extreme violence between Southwestern Native American tribes and a band of scalp hunters. On top of that, he was notoriously media shy. He was not quite at the Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger level of anonymity, but he was in the same ballpark.
All of this was not a great recipe for mainstream success. Much of that changed with the release of All the Pretty Horses, the first of his border trilogy. Although still challenging to read, the subject matter was more accessible and the violence slightly downscaled. That was just enough for the breathtaking, lyrical beauty of McCarthy’s prose to shine through.
Following the release of The Border Trilogy, McCarthy achieved even more success with the novels No Country for Old Men and the post apocalyptic The Road. Both of these (as well as All the Pretty Horses, and believe it or not, James Franco wrote and directed a low budget adaptation of Child of God) were made into film. I believe No Country for Old Men even won Best Picture. Even more shocking, in Time magazine I once read an interview with McCarthy and the Coen brothers.
He’d really come a long way. Now, sixteen years after his last novel (The Road), at the age of 89, he released The Passenger (as well as a companion novel, Stella Maris, that I have not yet read).
The plot (if you can call it that) starts with Bobby Western, a salvage diver. He and another diver named Oiler are sent down to investigate a plane that has crashed into the sea. They go down and they appear to be the first ones on the scene. They have to cut their way into the plane. When they do, they discover that one body is missing and the flight data box has been removed. Shortly after that, mysterious men arrive to interview Western. His apartment shows signs of being searched. Oiler mysteriously dies. Western’s funds are tied up by the IRS. He feels that his only escape is to live off completely off the grid.
In a different plot thread, we learn about his sister, Alicia, who committed suicide some years ago. Alicia and Bobby had apparently fallen in (unconsummated) love. Years later, Bobby is still grieving her. In this second thread, we learn that Alicia was a brilliant mathematician capable of insights that Bobby, himself a talented physicist, could not comprehend. Alicia was haunted by hallucinations. Most prominent of them is a flipper limbed man named Thalidomide kid that brings in various amateurish vaudeville styled hallucinations to entertain Alicia.
And that’s about it. If you come to a McCarthy novel expecting linear stories or even closure, you should check that expectation at the door.
I can’t get over how different this novel, at least to me, seems to be from his previous novels.
Reading the novel, I hear so many echoes, whether intentional or not, to other great artists. One of the characters, Long John, is positively Falstaffian in his love of food, language, and life. At one point he references a line from King Lear (“Too soon old and too late smart”, although it’s also an old German saying and since the Westerns were German, maybe that’s the reference?). The hidden unexplained conspiracy of the missing passenger and the unnamed government officials hounding Western strikes as a Pynchon level expression of paranoia, if not actually Kafkaesque. The text is rife with the puns and wordplay from a Pynchon novel as well. McCarthy’s deep dives into theoretical math and physics strikes me as something coming from the mind of David Foster Wallace. There’s even a short digression into the JFK assassination, in case you were missing a Don DeLillo Libra note in the text.
At the same time, it’s uniquely McCarthy. The exquisite descriptions of landscape are here. The deep thoughts expressed with words that seemingly glide over the page are here. And yes, the lost and obsolete words of some bygone age make appearances in the text. It is quite simply beautifully written.
One other thing that surprised me is the humor. Given his usual subject matter, McCarthy’s novels often have a dark humor. Here, there are sections (like when Western finds and converses with the half mad hermit Borman) that are laugh out loud funny.
So, I have to hand it to Cormac McCarthy. At the age of 89, nearly sixty years after his first novel was published, the fact that he can write such an innovative and creative novel that left me so surprised is an amazing accomplishment.
dorkenstein 