Why did I love this book?
The Passenger was the last novel Cormac McCarthy wrote before his death in June 2023.
I found it interesting that an author who is, perhaps, the best of his generation, and who wrote prolifically about the American West, chose to write about a deep sea salvage diver named Bobby Western, a man plagued by guilt over his father’s creation (the atomic bomb) and today’s America where soulless IRS agents and a government, unquestioned and unanswerable to anyone, stalks him over an inheritance granted him by his late grandmother, and a lawyer obsessed with the assassination of President John Kennedy.
These themes, along with McCarthy’s masterful writing, resonate with me because it’s my belief that post-Kennedy-assassination the United States changed profoundly and, in many ways, began to resemble its decades-long archenemy, the Soviet Union. I think it was Norman Mailer who wrote, “If you fight an enemy long enough you tend to become that enemy.” True. True.
6 authors picked The Passenger as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The 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.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“McCarthy returns with a one-two punch...a welcome return from a legend." —Esquire
Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series.
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western…
- Coming soon!