Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one of those novels each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
Books like The Passenger are important.
They can serve as a kind of litmus test. For example, anyone who says they enjoyed the experience of reading The Passenger immediately sets off my bullshit detector and becomes dubious to me.
Seriously, try reading any of the four- or five-star reviews of this book on Goodreads or Amazon, and tell me it doesn’t come across like someone defending their alcoholic tendencies just because they can manage to remain high-functioning.
The Passenger made me ask myself big questions.
How much do I, the reader, owe a Great Author in terms of attention and time investment?
What impact, if any, will The Passenger have on the totality of McCarthy’s legacy?
Did anyone edit this book, and if so, how do they sleep at night knowing they so belligerently shirked their responsibilities?
Ol’ Cormie could have walked off into the sunset with the insurmountable, unimpeachable The Road as the capstone to his legacy. That would have been one of the all-time great literary mic drops.
But instead of going out on top, he leaves us with this cryptic, prickly penultimate piece. The Passenger is the literary equivalent of Michael Jordan’s stint with the Washington Wizards.
There are glimmers of McCarthy greatness. But this is the work of a surly and curmudgeonly old poet who has been surly and curmudgeonly since he was in his 20s.
He’s perfected that worldview, and now he’s applying it to a disjointed, mostly uninteresting narrative about a misunderstood genius who is too brilliant and nuanced for this world full of sloppy humans. I appreciated the way Bobby Western tried to apply systems of knowledge to the world, especially in his youth, because it showed his desire to make sense of things. Exhaustively charting all of the wildlife in a ravine near his house, to show its biodiversity. Quantum mathematics. Later in life, religion. This theme resonated with me.
The problem is, this theme is a pinch of Magic Salt sprinkled sparsely over a casserole made of ingredients McCarthy rummaged out of a dumpster behind a roadside diner in rural Tennessee.
I took fewer notes reading this book than I did with any other McCarthy novel this year, because instead of taking notes, I was mostly too busy frowning and waiting for something captivating to happen. I waited until the last page for that, but it never came.
Still, I think the notes I did take reveal something about the spirit of this book. If you’ve never read it, look at these lines of prose and see what emotions or imagery they inspire in you.
Core questions can make you look stupid.
What if we’ve become something repugnant to ourselves?
I live in a windmill. Light candles to the dead. Trying to learn how to pray.
Ten percent biology and ninety percent night rumor.
Taken out of context, I think this reads like a nebulous form of poetry written by a man who understands the world and our existence in it on a very deep level, but no longer can make sense of the daily minutiae of that world as events play out around him. In that sense, I find a lot to relate to.
In The Passenger, there are also lush landscape paintings in word form, the type of which McCarthy is perhaps uniquely gifted at, in the way they juxtapose urban decay and tranquil beauty, evoking a timeless quality that makes humanity feel appropriately inconsequential.
He drove south to Logan Utah and took Highway 80 across Wyoming. Green River. Black Sprigs. Cheyenne. He slept in the truck and drove on. Crossing the central plains. The big tandem trucks plying the highway in the blowing snow. Ogallala. North Platte. In the red dusk flights of cranes crossing the highway. Circling and descending onto the flats where they landed walking and folded their wings and stepped and stood.
There are scenes of arresting quaintness. Bobby Western walking in sock feet, sandwich in hand, through an empty employee dorm in a field of oil derricks. Western decorating his childhood bedroom with parts salvaged from a downed airplane he found in a field.
The problem is, these endearing moments are buried in muck. So much of this novel is unlikable and/or impenetrable that McCarthy seems to intentionally be holding his readers at arms’ length. Maybe he wrote this one for himself, and not for us.
Bobby Western is in love with his sister – to a possibly incestuous degree. We can’t be sure. Western drifts aimlessly from being a salvage diver to a race car driver to a transient. Along the way, he has long and meandering conversations with inconsequential characters about complex math, the nature of existence, and in one particularly excruciating instance near the end of the book, the JFK assassination! None of it is fun or entertaining, though much of it is spellbindingly well-written on a technical level.
Don’t even get me started on the segments featuring Alicia, Western’s even more brilliant and too-beautiful-for-this-world sister. Her exchanges with The Kid (no, not The Kid from Blood Meridian, not by a long shot) are just repugnant. An unpalatable combination of circus imagery, Borscht Belt “comedy” and navel gazery. Get out of here with this shit, please.
I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that I’m just some idiot and this book is a masterpiece that I’m insufficiently equipped to recognize. Perhaps I’ll read it again when I’m at the end of my life and it will all make perfect sense. Maybe its companion novel, Stella Maris, will somehow redeem The Passenger. But I’m skeptical on all of these fronts.
Maybe there is something to the fact that The Road was followed, though all these years later, by The Passenger. The road is life, and we’re all just passengers on it?
So then who the heck is driving?
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
June: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
July: The Crossing (1994)
August: Cities of the Plain (1998)
September: No Country for Old Men (2005)
I've enjoyed reading your posts on Cormac, but I disagree about The Passenger. I'll say I also disagree about Suttree. I enjoyed both books quite alot. The Passenger is about death, imo. Though I haven't read his other works in awhile, it felt like I was coming back to his prose and his style. Of course it was difficult to follow, confusing and rambling, but then, to me, that is his style. I just try to enjoy the ride. I think it is densely packed with things I barely understand and will continue to be analyzed for years. Regardless, I'm happy we got another Cormac novel before he passed. I do think he intentionally makes his writing difficult to parse, but that's often been true throughout his works. He's not going to make it easy, but I felt, reading it, like it was an iceberg. There's so much beneath the surface.
Man, this is how i felt too. Great essay.