THE PASSENGER

The Crossing was the first Cormac McCarthy I read. It was in an undergraduate course called “Great Big Books." We also read things like Absalom,  Absalom!, Some Other Place, The Right Place, Ceremony, and Geek Love. Complex and often long books about, among other things, what it means to tell an American story. On the one hand, that’s obviously the kind of undergraduate bullshit that you can dismiss out of hand, but on the other hand, when it’s done well it can be really powerful. It’s one of the courses that most shaped the way that I read and think about books. These meaty novels that were all banging their heads against the American experience and reckoning with it in different ways was illuminating.

One of the other reasons that course was so formative was because it introduced me to Cormac McCarthy, an event that affected my reading habits for the next half-decade. For a certain type of insufferable creative writing major at a liberal arts school in the South, getting into the McCarthy catalog is a game-changer. He provides a model for artistic achievement that doesn’t require you to sacrifice your 20-year old’s mental image of masculinity. Would Carson McCullers eschew quotation marks so brashly? To be clear, that’s the folly of youth speaking. Cormac McCarthy was and remains a horse girl at heart, but when you’re young, it’s easier to confuse sizzle for steak.

My indoctrination happened around the same time that No Country for Old Men came out, so there was a lof of Cormac in the air. And all that musky effervescence propelled me through book after book of his. In that fever state, I don’t think that I was actually reading them all that closely. It’s more like they were passing over me. His prose became the atmosphere I wanted to breathe and the yardstick against which a lot of the fiction I read was judged. It was only some years later, that it hit me how down bad I was for his disaffected and joyless version of the world. There are any number of authors who write about men sitting atop horses on cold nights, but I think it was Robert Olmstead that finally did me in. I was reading one of his dour little treatises, and started to see them those books for what they actually are. I thought they were a true and honest expression of literary achievement. Books in search of something real. But what they actually were and are is genre fiction with a thin veneer. They’re a bad impression of the best of McCarthy.

Here we are now, ten-odd years later, and the big novel that Cormac had been rumored to have been writing for the past thirty years has been released. In that time, the world has changed. I’ve changed. Presumably, Cormac has changed as well. And after finishing The Passenger, something I've been looking forward to for years, I don't know whether or not it's a good book. To be clear, I don't think it's bad. It's fine, at worst. But is it great? Is it even very good? His books always live on the knife’s edge between masculine melodrama^[1] and meaning, so it’s not like this is necessarily anything new, but given how much time has passed between this book’s release and his other works, I find myself wondering whether or not he has actually changed, or the way I feel now about this book is the same way I’d feel about Blood Meridian if I reread it. Are McCarthy novels all-timers? Or are they a class of novel you graduate from? The long-standing rumors of this book certainly don’t help it. Anything that gestates for this long is going to enter the world in the face of some pretty steep expectations. If nothing else, Chinese Democracy taught us that. There’s almost no way this could have been what everyone wanted it to be.

One of the things I’ve come to recognize about McCarthy’s worldview is the extent to which it’s filtered through solitary men. While that's catnip for twenty-year-old boys who don’t understand how shallow and short-sighted it is, it does a pretty poor job representing the world all the rest of us live in. I first loved how much The Crossing seemed to be about the American experience. That happened through a lot of conversations between plain-spoken but thoughtful men, but it happened. One of the things that feels different about this novel compared to his earlier works is how disconnected and surreal everything is from the real world. It all feels more like a thought experiment than it does anything a human might realistically experience. And for a novel to reach the heights that Moby Dick or Housekeeping does, it has to be able to situate their thematic ideas in a real world. The world of The Passenger just doesn’t feel all that real. So even though the stakes are nominally high, they just don’t feel as high since everything seems to be happening in this strange shadow world. Aside from the nature of McCarthy’s world feeling different, I also feel like his prose has changed in some important ways.

Thar prose is what a lot of readers first latch onto. The way he describes spare and desolate things with rich and unexpected prose is distinctive. In the same southern tradition as Faulkner, he creates a style that’s easy to imitate but difficult to reproduce a satisfying version of^[2]. In the last couple of books, his prose got even sparser, and some of the florid touches that people love in Suttree or Blood Meridian fell to the wayside in service of novels that were more tightly plotted. The sort of meandering lush prose is back in The Passenger, but it doesn’t feel quite as satisfying. It’s hard to know how much of that is his fault. Multiple generations of writers have been aping his style, so even the real version can feel like a bad impression at times. When he writes that “The lawndwarves in the shadow of her desk put forth woodenly” you almost feel like you’re being punk’d. What artistic effect are you achieving by compressing lawn dwarf into a single word? Don’t even try to parse ‘put forth woodenly’ because it will only leave you more confused and upset. And yet, you also get some classic McCarthy bangers like “The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.” That’s the good shit, and the fact that both exist in the same book is wild. That the author of the second, who you imagine as this grey-eyed sage who doesn’t have time for television or fantasy baseball, is the same as the author of the first almost doesn’t compute.

Complicating all that is the introduction of physics and math into McCarthy’s ken. At some point he took up an office at the Santa Fe Institute, and it would seem found a new lens through which his personal brand of nihilism could be viewed. Admittedly, it’s a good fit. You can imagine the moment he found out there was some scientific basis to the notion that everything was ultimately unknowable but also irrevocably tending toward a heat-death based nothingness. He probably had to sit down he was so excited.^[3]. And as exciting as it was for him, it creates this kind of intractable problem that the novel has to solve: how do you make meaningful art about coming to grips with meaninglessness.

What follows are mild spoilers about the plot of the novel.

The inciting mystery of the novel is a pretty classic McCarthy set-up. It’s a combination of Hitchcock, Larry McMurtry, and Thomas Pynchon. A salvage diver is hired to explore the wreckage of a crashed airplane. That airplane is sunk in the ocean but shows no signs of having crashed. Its black box is missing, as is a single passenger. There is no evidence for how either the black box or the passenger came to be missing, and absolutely no indicators of how the plane and the other passengers came to be under water. Trying to figure that out pulls Robert Western, the diver, unexpectedly into whatever sort of chicanery is going on. That mystery and any investigation into it unfortunately exists in a different book. Instead of ever learning anything else about what happened, Western spends the rest of the novel trying to escape the fact that he became unwittingly involved in the plot. At the same time, Western is trying to escape the shadow cast by his sister’s suicide (a suicide at least partially caused by the romantic relationship they had) and come to terms with his grief. Now if you’re sitting there thinking that sounds like a tough tight tope to walk, Brother, you’d be correct.

The uneasy relationship Western has with his sister also gets wrapped up in the kind of odd decision to break this story up into two volumes. I say this not having read the second, currently unpublished, volume (which is described as a “tightly controlled coda”), but it’s kind of hard not to read this as an attempt by the publisher to sell two books instead of one. You can understand the thinking. This is probably their last bite at the McCarthy apple, so why not try to get all you can out of it. Back when I used to spend more time in used books stores, I remember seeing countless copies of Cities of the Plain^[4], and I can’t help but think we’re going to be seeing a whole bunch of Stella Marises (Stellas Maris?) on those shelves in a few years. There’s a small part of me holding out hope that this decision to split the books will pay off. That something in there will help bring closure, if not resolution, to everything The Passenger sets up. Maybe that’s appropriate, a small amount of hope is normally the best you can do at the end of a McCarthy novel. And maybe that’s the root of my problems with the book: I want something different from what he’s selling. I’m not convinced the world is quite as dark as he seem to think it, and this book doesn’t do much to convince me.

There are a few other odds and ends that feel important to at least call out:

1. The names in this, my god. I mean the main character is named Western. But there are others. Somebody else’s last name is Harbinger. When you combine the stilted, quotation mark-less dialogue with names like that, it’s kind of hard not to read this as some weird morality play about all the topics that traipse around Cormac’s head.
2. A Cormac McCarthy novel remains a not great place to be a lady.
3. I watched The Counselor recently, and it weirdly has a lot in common with this. It sets up as a kind of plotty drug thriller, but then the actual plot mechanics just kind of disappear and it turns into Fassbender talking with various people about annihilation.