Review: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld

“Geriatrica” is a fairly derogatory term that’s lobbied against late works of an author, juxtaposed with juvenilia, to paint them as not up-to-par with the rest of their bibliography. When old age comes and cognition fades, can an author really reach the heights of their earlier masterpieces? Cormac McCarthy is eighty-nine years old upon the release of his latest novel The Passenger, which could certainly class it as geriatrica. But Cormac has had a strange career. He began with smaller and more grounded novels about early 20th century Appalachian America, clearly inspired by Faulkner. After that, he veered more into the past. His most well-regarded novel is Blood Meridian, a bleak and bloody image of the conquest of the American west, published in 1985, when he was 52 years old, but it did not receive much critical acclaim at the time. In the 1990s, he became famous for his Westerner-inspired trilogy The Border. His megahit books came in 2005 and 2006, when he was 72 years old. The Road (2005) is a survival story about a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world. It placed him on Oprah and is read in some high school classrooms. No Country for Old Men (2006) was a contemporary style Western quickly adapted into a very well-regarded and faithful Coen brother’s film that’s probably the widest exposure Cormac’s work has gotten. 

The Passenger (2022) and its companion novel Stella Maris come after sixteen years of Cormac drought. Total speculation, but I personally get the sense that they could have been ready five years ago for posthumous release, but he gradually refined the books until he realized there was nothing to do but publish. The new books purports to be a new era of Cormac McCarthy, more science fiction, more grounded in physics and math, due to his time with the Sante Fe Institute. I had no idea what the Santa Fe institute was until I started researching this book, and still don’t really understand it. It appears to be a sort of speculative physicist community.

The book opens with a dramatic and striking image of the main character, parodically named “Bobby Western”, deep sea diving into the Gulf Coast to investigate a crashed plane. He finds the plane in good condition, no signs of damage from impact. The blackbox is missing, as is one of the passengers of the plane. Ambiguous government agents question Bobby about the plane, refusing to give him much information. They know more about the crash than him and seem to think he knows more than he really knows. Given the title of the book, one could reasonably expect the plot to continue as a sort of True Detective style investigation into this missing passenger, but that’s mostly where the plot connections to this crashed plane ends. Bobby’s bank accounts are locked by the government, his passport is revoked, which puts him on the run, but the novel is mostly about Bobby’s troubled past and the Cormac style mathematical philosophical ideas that underpin the book.

Bobby’s father was one of the men who built the atomic bomb, and he feels conflicted about that. Bobby was a talented physicist himself, but not talented enough to change the world like his father did, so he became a deep sea salvage diver, and he feels conflicted about that. The biggest thing Bobby feels conflicted about is his younger sister Alicia. His sister is a super genius, who attended the University of Chicago at age thirteen. Bobby has been in love with her since she was around that age. Due to her intelligence, his sister developed an essentially antinatalist view of the world that it “would have been better to not have been” and eventually kills herself after being institutionalized for a few years. Bobby feels guilt about letting her die, feels guilt about not being strong enough to kill himself to join her. The book begins in 1980, around ten years after her death. 

The main narrative of the book is Bobby attempting to come to terms with his sister’s death while the government imposes on his various freedoms. Most of the book in terms of page count is Bobby having conversations with various people across the New Orleans area. He talks with con men, trans prostitutes, other deep sea divers. Many of the characters he talks to die. It’s a little hard to keep the various characters other than Bobby straight because they all sort of talk about the same things and the main point is their conversations. They talk about philosophy, about god, about death, about the government, and as the press for the book really hypes up, about math, about physics. Those conversations are sometimes interesting and sometimes boring. Cormac often namedrops physicists and mathematical concepts and doesn't seem too interested in ensuring you're along for the ride with him.  

In addition to the physics, which to me mostly felt like flavor,  this is a pretty anti-government book, the most I’ve noticed that thread in Cormac’s books. Bobby’s family home in Tennessee, still lived in by his grandmother, is raided by the government before the narrative of the book. They steal many of the papers and family photos of his father and sister kept there. Bobby talks with government agents that refuse to give him any info in some Kafka-style interrogations. There’s one extremely lengthy section where a character talks about the death of JFK that seems to let out the feelings Cormac has on the American government: corrupt, mysterious, never revealing answers, willing to intrude on freedoms at any cost. 

Interspersed with the linearly narrated Bobby chapters are various cuts to Alicia’s life before her death from her perspective. In those chapters, she often interacts with a hallucinatory figure named “The Kid” who is also potentially an interdimensional being because he appears to Bobby once. “The Kid” has no answers. He routinely messes up English phrases in clever ways, such as “carrion bag” instead of “carry-on bag”. He seems detached from the world and sees connections that normal humans can’t, but they're sometimes false connections. He challenges Alicia in various philosophical and mathematical ways but it doesn’t really go anywhere. 

Underlying all the physics and anti-government and schizophrenia/aliens, Cormac’s uniting thesis of The Passenger seems to me that there is immense suffering in the world, as a result of human advancement but mostly just human consciousness. Humans can advance farther, but that’s not going to solve the fundamental problem. Humans can unlock quantum mechanics, solve any of the projects of physics, but that can’t change the fundamental tragedy of the universe, that all must die and we must be aware of our death. The one salvation Cormac finds is that consciousness isn’t permanent. The book also spends a lot of time on the mundanities of Bobby’s life on the run, describing the details of his food preparation, animals he sees, places he walks through. Those are some of the sections I found most interesting and it’s clear Cormac doesn’t reject the world in the way antinatalists do. It may not even be a tragedy because once the universe dies there won’t be anyone left conscious to be sad over its death. The title The Passenger feels to me like a clever joke that human consciousness is like a passenger, along for a ride that it can’t really understand and doesn’t need to be on. Cormac is always a bit more literary and clever than I think people, himself included, like to admit. Early in this book he has a turn of phrase “their empty conversation hanging in the air like bits of code” which is a very beautiful Delillo-style sentence that I don’t think even Delillo could have done quite that well. It reminded me of my favorite Cormac turn of phrase in Blood Meridian of the “cold austic dark”. Cormac drops these phrases as arbitrary parts of the plot progression rather than focal points in a way that I find very admirable, but it does feel like he’s hiding them.

What this book most reminded me of was Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Inherent Vice is a late career book from Thomas Pynchon, where he lays out his anti-bureaucracy anti-capitalist worldview a little more plainly than some of his previous books do, setting it through series of dialog heavy mystery novel style conversations that don’t ever resolve the mystery. That’s basically what The Passenger does too, for the anti-consciousness anti-authority worldview of Cormac McCarthy.  These elements were there in the author’s earlier books, but now in their late “geriatrica”, they make them more open. I think I liked Inherent Vice better because I like the ideas of Pynchon better and I don’t know that I was fully smart enough to get those ideas from Gravity’s Rainbow unaccompanied by the more open Inherent Vice.

Would I recommend you read The Passenger? I don’t know. I don't think it qualifies as geriatrica in a mean sense but I also don't think it reaches the heights of Blood Meridian, and I don't recommend Blood Meridian to that many people. Cormac McCarthy is a genius, he has a very unique worldview that’s extremely rare in today’s world, and it’s important that there’s someone very smart out there thinking like this. But whenever I think about whether I should recommend Cormac I always feel like I should just recommend Moby-Dick instead. Melville captures the same existential bleakness as McCarthy but has so much more, so much that both refutes and deepens it. The companion novel Stella Maris, which is fully centered around the mathematical and philosophical conversations between Alicia and a therapist while she is institutionalized, comes out in December. I don’t think I’ll read that unless I hear it’s really good because I think I got enough out of The Passenger. The Passenger is a very bleak Cormac book that talks about physics and math a little. I think the people who know they want to read that will know.