The Passenger

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy’s last novel (along with Stella Maris, a companion volume), contains writing as good as anything in his long career.

Bobby Western is a math savant, ex-race car driver, and (currently) deep-sea salvage diver. After diving to inspect a private plane submerged in the waters off the Louisiana coast, Bobby becomes embroiled in a life-and-death conspiracy; he’s also obsessed with the memory of his sister Alicia, another genius savant whose suicide opens the novel.

Some sections of The Passenger are over-the-top (extended bar-room monologues, Alicia’s cartoonish hallucinations) but the world McCarthy creates is deeply compelling and suggests… show more.

The Passenger provides what Cormac McCarthy always did best: creating multifaceted characters searching for meaning in what they find to be a harsh and uncaring world. He’s so good at doing this, in fact, that a tight plot is not required to enjoy his work.

Few writers can plunge into the existential darkness of being alive and keep you engaged as a reader quite like him. I’ve always admired the way his prose marches along, driving like a hard rain, daring you to keep turning pages even though you have a bad feeling about how things are going to turn… show more.

I relish fiction that leads me beyond genre into unanticipated regions while enquiring into the great questions. In this regard, this book excels.

It opens as a noir mystery thriller involving a missing passenger on a submerged jet, then follows salvage diver Robert Western’s attempts to unravel the threads of his life as he is shadowed by government agents and haunted by the loss of his psychotic, demon-plagued sister, Alicia.

There are allusions to an illicit love, memories of a deceased father involved in the creation of the atomic bomb, of mysterious deaths… Solving the mystery is never the point.… show more.

McCarthy is a genius. He passed away this year, and I have read every one of his brilliant novels. His final work, The Passenger (along with a second novel, Stella Maris), is a slight departure from his earlier work but no less stunning.

He gives the reader those awe-inspiring, gorgeous sentences that transport you and take your breath away, but he also takes us on a journey into the soul of a man whose relationship with his psychotic sister is painfully rendered, and he also immerses us into the world of a salvage diver.

Of note: He is able… show more.

No other writer of our time can compare with Cormac McCarthy’s way with words. He has (had) a unique ability to use language to weave words into phrases and sentences and paragraphs that beg to be re-read and savored.

While The Passenger is not his finest work, it is still a cut above the run of today’s fiction. The story stumbles somewhat into its own holes, but the blend of mystery, mental illness, mathematics, physics, philosophy, bizarre hallucinations, sibling affection, shadowy stalkers, and living off the grid provides more than plenty to ponder, appreciate, and enjoy.

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… show more.