Review
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NEW YORK TIMES • GOODREADS • KIRKUS
CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE
“A total banger…[The Passenger] blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work. It’s the first novel I’ve read in years that I feel I need to read three more times to fully understand, and that I want to read three more times simply to savor. It’s so packed with funny, strange, haunted sentences that other writers will be stealing lines from it for epigraphs, as if it were Ecclesiastes, for the next 150 years….The whole thing reads like a cosmic, bleakly funny John D. MacDonald thriller…The Passenger is a great New Orleans novel. It’s a great food novel…For anyone who cares, it’s also a great Knoxville novel — Knoxville being where McCarthy spent most of his childhood. It’s filled with references to his earlier work...A sprawling book of ideas."
–Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A brilliant book… A stunning accomplishment…McCarthy turns his substantial writerly gifts upon two distinct forces: the mechanical and the theoretical. He attends to the exquisite detail of Bobby’s physical world—the sounds and feel of an oil rig in a storm, the touch and clunk of a cigarette machine in a bar, the step-by-step process of removing a bathroom cabinet or digging up and carting off buried treasure…It’s Cormac McCarthy writing as only Cormac McCarthy can.”
–Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form, just as he reworked the apocalypse in The Road… Western knows he’s suspected of something, but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness—never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—but Western knows that his life is in danger and that he must run… The style—a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution—is pure McCarthy.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“With the publication of The Passenger and its companion novel Stella Maris, McCarthy seems to be done mining the myth of America. Instead, he ponders what it means to exist, and what our history tells us about our future… He digs into the big ideas of the universe, like human existence and what it means, as well as what our history and memory mean. He’s searching for something different… Where other writers venture into the mind and soul, McCarthy has leapt past that to ask what a soul is—and if it even exists…. McCarthy is no longer searching in the dirt trail across the West and saying, ‘This is it. This is our human nature.’ In The Passenger and Stella Maris, he’s trying to see the God that made the man who wrote those words.”
—Kevin Koczwara, Esquire
“After sixteen years of characteristic seclusion, McCarthy returns with a one-two punch...The Passenger is an elegiac meditation on guilt, grief, and spirituality. Packed with textbook McCarthy hallmarks, like transgressive behaviors and cascades of ecstatic language, it’s a welcome return from a legend who’s been gone too long.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“At 89, [McCarthy is] still riffing, like a jazz virtuoso, on the American Nightmare, Faulkner’s mythmaking, and the cadences of Joyce. McCarthy’s flame burns bright and clear in two new works…The Passenger, wondrous in its architecture, and a companion piece, Stella Maris, a minimalist, edgy novella…McCarthy toggles between books and across decades, sketching the contours of a love that dare not say its name. McCarthy’s art is transcendent even as it takes no prisoners, an achievement akin only to the oeuvres of his greatest peers, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. He will endure.”
—Oprah Daily
“Sometimes I think the reason literary criticism got obsessed with evaluating prose as ‘sentences’ over the past few decades is simply that McCarthy’s are so good. They rattle out at you like little bullets, mean and punchy and precise… Taken together, [The Passenger and Stella Maris] offer an intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer.”
—Constance Grady, Vox
“His first novels since his 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner The Road…are as bold and intellectually keen as anything the author’s ever written…Faulknerian.”
—Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
“An imposing achievement and a testament to nearly nine decades of inquiry by a brilliant mind…The Passenger is a powerful and thought-provoking distillation of many of the genres and ideas that have obsessed McCarthy throughout his career. There are lyrical evocations of nature reminiscent of The Border Trilogy, elements of sinister thriller straight from Νo Country for Old Men, moments of death-haunted solitude that recall The Road, and a comic cataloging of deviants and misfits that revives the riverside anthropology of Suttree. The book’s kaleidoscopic compression of sensibilities and subjects constitutes a new aesthetic in its own right.”
—Nick Romeo, Daily Beast
“Like [Bob] Dylan, McCarthy fashions the country as a cast-iron, biblical land where grand themes play out in vast landscapes around lonely, small people. You can practically hear the rusty gate swaying in the wind, everything made of leather, mud, or simmering flesh. Most of us imagine life as a high-wire act with oneself as the acrobat, but McCarthy acknowledges it as a bridge, an ordinary path of extraordinary consequence with a beginning, an end, and an edge most men don’t ever tempt…The language in The Passenger and Stella Maris is compelling and soulful, even when the voice sounds sharp. Amid…talk of mathematics and wickedness and hideous ruination, there is poetry and the rhythm of song. Sheddan’s lines alone are worth the price of admission, such as when he says humans are ‘ten percent biology and ninety percent nightrumor,’ and that ‘every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.’”
—Nathan King, Air Mail
“The Passenger and Stella Maris tackle dazzlingly fresh ground…McCarthy’s daring has not dimmed since The Road, and The Passenger and Stella Maris pull no punches as they explore the craggiest regions of human consciousness through two of McCarthy’s most vividly drawn characters… McCarthy’s writing retains the tangible gristle of a field guide, full of the organic solidity and exacting diction that have helped solidify his reputation… Read together, The Passenger and Stella Maris are a fascinating diptych, bringing light and depth to each other. The mysteries and coincidences are legion, and mirrored moments are plentiful …. McCarthy’s writing pursues a sublime and majestic undercurrent weaving through the dark waves of chaos…. The results are staggering.”
—Seth L. Riley, The Millions
“Critics have detected the influence on [McCarthy] of Faulkner and Hemingway, but this is to understate his achievement. His new novel, The Passenger, shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need…Many of the book’s scenes have a numinous, enigmatic quality that lingers in the mind…The Passenger is a study in living without answers.”
—John Gray, New Statesman
“A sprawling, surreal affair, a book as strange as any he’s ever written, and reminiscent of the melancholy drift and God-haunted monologues of McCarthy’s earliest novels….Almost everything about the novel’s first hundred pages generates expectations for something tough, lean and violent…And then—beautifully, mysteriously, and somewhat bafflingly—we get another book entirely … McCarthy [is]…a writer of both wonderfully taut and often very funny dialogue, and this is a book full of talk, bouncing from jokey drunk chat to near-baffling stretches of monologic erudition … He is a prose stylist without peer … On almost every page some Faulknerian dazzle finds you…It’s thrilling to return to writing as unashamedly biblical and rhetorical as this.”
–Adam Rivett, The Sydney Morning Herald
“[The Passenger] is among McCarthy’s most quietly reflective novels, recalling the moments of serenity amid scenes of devastation that made The Road so haunting…The ebb and flow of spare economy and lyrical intoxication undoubtedly lends the most rhapsodic passages a poignancy unusual even by McCarthy’s standards….A moving and characteristically disconcerting addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s greatest writers.”
—Doug Battersby, Irish Times
“A…beautifully rendered meditation on humanity’s relationship to nature… McCarthy, perhaps the most lyrical poet of slaughter since Homer, is at his most biblical and elegiac describing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… The Passenger and Stella Maris together form a profound addition to the legacy of a true literary savant.”
—Ed Tarkington, Chapter 16
“[McCarthy] rockets readers into the black hole at the hub of his galactic imagination, an event horizon so rich and dense we can only marvel as we fall through its warped fabric….Like Moses, McCarthy seeks a land of milk and honey beyond the rim of the universe but spies only oblivion (and perhaps the ghostly glow of math)… Despite the darkness ahead, The Passenger and Stella Maris crown a magnificent career that will guide us forward, for as long as the lights stay on.”
—Hamilton Cain, Star Tribune
“[A] dizzyingly metaphysical treatise on the human condition. Although McCarthy initially clothes The Passenger in the trappings of Hitchcockian espionage, it only takes so many conversations between Western and his lively cadre of barfly philosopher chums to realize that it’s in these digressions where McCarthy’s true fascination lies...The full payoff is unquestionably something remarkable. Eschewing body counts for philosophical debate, the legacy of McCarthy’s new offerings is…both magnificent and cruelly impossible to define.”
—Zack Ruskin, SF Chronicle
“[McCarthy] reigns as a titan of American lit--an undisputed heir to Melville and Faulkner, the subject of infinite grad-school theses, and a hard-nosed dispenser of what Saul Bellow called ‘life-giving and death-dealing’ sentences... It's the humid, fevered, magniloquent, Bible-cadenced, comma-starved, word-drunk prose of what some fans consider his masterwork, Suttree... There's a lot here. It might make your head spin... What it all adds up to--perhaps surprisingly--is a doomed and unsettling love story, a Platonic tragedy.... Electric and thunderous… An astonishing pair of novels… Taken together, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an intellectually breathtaking achievement.”
–Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun
“This gripping mystery is sure to satisfy readers of one of our most acclaimed living authors.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“The darkness of McCarthy’s subject matter, combined with a high-flown style that earns him comparisons to William Faulkner and James Joyce, has contributed to his legend as perhaps the greatest living American author…At a time when the dominant strain of American writing is still ‘autofiction,’ …McCarthy’s epic, blood-drenched tales of the American South and Southwest are a throwback to a time when novelists wrote big books about big questions and had the temerity to think they could answer them…Death and violence are his great subjects, which he approaches with philosophical rigour and theological depth.”
–Park Macdougald, UnHerd
“A compelling read…The Passenger is, to coin a phrase, a pre-apocalyptic novel… McCarthy has a lilting legato to his prose; usually quiet, sometimes unexpected. The word ‘gray’ is seeded across the novel…There is no black or white in this ashen world.”
–Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
“Chilling and masterly.... His prose frequently approaches the Shakespearean, ranging from droll humor to the rapid-fire spouting of quotable fecundity. Dialogues click into place like a finely tuned engine. McCarthy has somehow added a new register to his inimitable voice. Long ensconced in the literary firmament, McCarthy further bolsters his claim for the Mount Rushmore of the literary arts.”
–Booklist, starred
"A beguiling, surpassingly strange novel by the renowned—and decidedly idiosyncratic—author of Blood Meridian (1982) and The Road (2006)… It’s all vintage McCarthy, if less bloody than much of his work: Having logged time among scientists as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, he’s now more interested in darting quarks than exploding heads…Plenty of his trademark themes and techniques are in evidence, from conspiracy theories…and shocking behavior…to flights of beautiful language…Enigmatic, elegant, extraordinary: a welcome return after a too-long absence."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred
“A rich story of an underachieving salvage diver in 1980 New Orleans... This thriller narrative is intertwined with the story of Western’s sister, Alicia… He dazzles with his descriptions of a beautifully broken New Orleans… The book’s many pleasures will leave readers aching for the final installment.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Passenger is worthy of becoming your favorite new literary drug, a multifaceted jewel of a book that will keep you up all night reading and thinking…There is also plenty of grim laugh-out-loud humor scattered in the tales of war, death and love…[The Passenger] is required and unforgettable reading that will make you even more impatient to encounter its companion.”
—Joe Hartlaub, Book Reporter
About the Author
The novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men—the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. He died in 2023.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I
This then would be Chicago in the winter of the last year of her life. In a week’s time she would return to Stella Maris and from there wander away into the bleak Wisconsin woods. The Thalidomide Kid found her in a roominghouse on Clark Street. Near North Side. He knocked at the door. Unusual for him. Of course she knew who it was. She’d been expecting him. And anyway it wasnt really a knock. Just a sort of slapping sound.
He paced up and back at the foot of her bed. He stopped to speak and thought better of it and paced again, kneading his hands before him like the villain in a silent film. Except of course they werent really hands. Just flippers. Sort of like a seal has. In the left of which he now cradled his chin as he paused and stood to study her. Back by popular demand, he said. In the flesh.
It took you long enough to get here.
Yeah. The lights were against us all the way.
How did you know which room it was?
Easy. Room 4-C. I foresaw it. What are you using for money?
I’ve still got money.
The Kid looked around. I like what you’ve done with the place. Maybe we can tour the garden after tea. What are your plans?
I think you know what my plans are.
Yeah. Things dont look too promising, do they?
Nothing’s forever.
You leaving a note?
I’m writing my brother a letter.
A wintry summary I’ll wager.
The Kid was at the window looking out at the raw cold. The snowy park and the frozen lake beyond. Well, he said. Life. What can you say? It’s not for everybody. Jesus, the winters are confining.
Is that it?
Is what it.
Is that all you have to say?
I’m thinking.
He was pacing again. Then he stopped. What if we packed up and just skedaddled?
It wouldnt make any difference.
What if we stayed?
What, another eight years of you and your pennydreadful friends?
Nine, Mathgirl.
Nine then.
Why not?
No thank you.
He paced. Slowly rubbing his small scarred head. He looked like he’d been brought into the world with icetongs. He stopped at the window again. You’ll miss us, he said. We’ve come a long way together.
Sure, she said. It’s been just wonderful. Look. This is all beside the point. Nobody’s going to miss anybody.
We didnt even have to come, you know.
I dont know what you had to do. I’m not conversant with your duties. I never was. And now I dont care.
Yeah. You always did think the worst.
And was seldom disappointed.
Not every ectromelic hallucination who shows up in your boudoir on your birthday is out to get you. We tried to spread a little sunshine in a troubled world. What’s wrong with that?
It’s not my birthday. And I think we know what it is you’ve been spreading. Anyway, you’re not going to get in my good graces so just forget it.
You dont have any good graces. You’re fresh out.
All the better.
The Kid was looking around the room. Jesus, he said. This place really sucks. Did you see what just crossed the floor? What, are we completely out of Zyklon B? You were never exactly Mama’s little housekeeper but I think you’ve outdone yourself here. Time was you wouldnt be caught dead in a dump like this. Are you seeing to your person?
That’s none of your business.
One more in a long history of unkempt premises. Yeah, well. You dont know what’s in the offing, do you? If you’ll pardon the pun. Ever thought about taking the veil? Okay. Just thought I’d ask.
Why dont we just make what amends we can and let the rest go. Dont make it worse than it is.
Yeah yeah sure sure.
You knew this was coming. You like to pretend that I have secrets from you.
You do. Have secrets. Christ it’s cold in here. You could hang meat in this fucking place. You called me a spectral operator.
I what?
Called me a spectral operator.
I never called you any such thing. It’s a mathematical term.
Yeah. Say you.
You can look it up.
You always say that.
You never do that.
Yeah, well. It’s water under the bridge.
Is that what it is? What, you’re worried about a low grade on your job report?
Call it what you like, Princess. We did the best we could. The malady lingers on.
That’s all right. It wont linger much longer.
Yeah, I keep forgetting. Off to the bourne from whence no traveler whatever the fuck.
You keep forgetting?
Figure of speech. I dont forget much. Of course you dont seem to have all that much in the way of recollection concerning the state we found you in when we first showed up.
I dont have to recollect it. I’m still in it.
Yeah, right. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think I remember a young girl on tiptoes peering through a high aperture infrequently reported upon in the archives. What did she see? A figure at the gate? But that aint the question, is it? The question is did it see her? A small bore of light. Who would notice? But the hounds of hell can pass through the weem of a ring. Am I right or what?
I was fine till you showed up.
Jesus you’re a piece of work. Did you know that? Still, I’ve got to hand it to you. As the trick said to the blind hooker. Hell’s own, drooling and leering, and she’s trying to look over their shoulder. What’s out there? Dunno. Some atavism out of a dead ancestor’s psychosis come in out of the rain. Over there smoking in the corner. Well what the hell. Let me get the lights. No good. Shut off the projector. Who the fuck ordered this anyway? Roll up the screen and the fucking things are on the wall. The other thing you called me was a pathogen.
You are a pathogen.
See?
Are they coming in or not?
Is who coming in?
Cut it out. I know they’re out there.
The horts, that would be.
That would be.
All in good time.
I can see their feet under the door. I can see the shadows of their feet.
Feet and the shadows of feet. Just like in the real world.
What are they waiting for?
Who knows? Maybe they dont feel welcome.
That never stopped them before.
The Kid arched one mothgnawn eyebrow. Yeah? he said.
Yeah, she said. Pulling the blanket about her shoulders. No one invited you. You just showed up.
Okay, said the Kid. Someone in the hallway, right? Well let’s take a look.
He skated to the door in a long glissade and stopped and pushed back his sleeve and gripped the knob with his flipper. Ready? he called. He hauled the door open. The hallway was empty. He looked back over his shoulder at her. Looks like they flew the coop. Unless—how do I put this—it was your imagination?
I know they were there. I can smell them. I can smell Miss Vivian’s perfume. And I can certainly smell Grogan.
Yeah? Could just be somebody cooking cabbages down the hall. Anything else? Any sulphur? Brimstone?
He shut the door. Immediately the crowd outside was back. Shuffling and coughing. He rubbed his flippers together. As if to warm them. All right. Where was I? Maybe we should bring you up to date on some of the projects. You might stabilize a bit if you saw some of the progress we’ve made.
Stabilize?
We ran the stuff we got from you and so far everything looks good.
What stuff you got from me? You didnt get any stuff from me.
Yeah, right. We’re still getting one hundred leptons to the drachma which is okay in the sense that it’s not really wrong but we hope that most of this classical stuff will come out in the wash and we can get down to the renormal. You’re always going to see different shit once you get everything under the light. You just differentiate, that’s all. No shadows at this scale of course. You got these black interstices you’re looking at. We know now that the continua dont actually continue. That there aint no linear, Laura. However you cook it down it’s going to finally come to periodicity. Of course the light wont subtend at this level. Wont reach from shore to shore, in a manner of speaking. So what is it that’s in the in-between that you’d like to mess with but cant see because of the aforementioned difficulties? Dunno. What’s that you say? Not much help? How come this and how come that? I dont know. How come sheep dont shrink in the rain? We’re working without a net here. Where there’s no space you cant extrapolate. Where would you go? You send stuff out but you dont know where it’s been when you get it back. All right. No need to get your knickers in a twist. You just need to knuckle down and do some by god calculating. That’s where you come in. You got stuff here that is maybe just virtual and maybe not but still the rules have got to be in it or you tell me where the fuck are the rules located? Which of course is what we’re after, Alice. The blessed be to Jesus rules. You put everything in a jar and then you name the jar and go from there à la the Gödel and Church crowd and in the meantime real stuff which is probably some substrate of the substrate is hauling ass off down the road at deformable speeds with the provision that what has no mass has no volume variant or otherwise and therefore no shape and what cant flatten cant inflate and vice versa in the best commutative tradition and at this point—to borrow a term—we’re stuck. Right?
You dont know what you’re talking about. It’s all gibberish.
Yeah? Well just remember whose hand is on the nandgate Ducky. Because it aint the cradlerocker and it aint the dude in the runic tunic. If you get my drift. Hold it. I got a call. He rummaged in his pockets and produced an enormous phone and clapped it to his small and gnarly ear. Make it quick, Dick. We’re in conference. Yeah. A semihostile. Right. Base Two. We’re on fucking oxygen up here. No. No. Tough titty. Two wrongs dont make a riot. They’re a pack of dimpled fuckwits and you can tell them I said so. Call me back.
He rang off and pushed the antenna down with the heel of his flipper and shoved the phone back into his clothes and looked at her. There’s always somebody that doesnt get the word.
Who doesnt get.
Right. Back to the charts. I know what you’re thinking. But sometimes you just got to go for the equivalence. Run a montecarlo on the motherfucker and be done with it. For better or worse. We aint got till Christmas.
It is Christmas. Almost.
Yeah, well. Whatever. Where was I?
Does it make any difference?
Your number one lab device is going to be the servomechanism. Master and slave. Hook up a pantograph. Put the stylus in the dilemma and rotate. Count to four. Sign to sign. Repeat until the lemniscate appears.
The Kid did a little buck and wing and another long slide across the linoleum and stopped and began to pace again. They’re going for the big Kahuna. Boom boom time on the savannah, Hannah. Plenty of broads in the mix too in spite of all the whining from the sci-fems. I had my people check it out. You got your Madam Curry. Your Pamela Dirac.
Your who?
Not to mention others nameless for the nonce. Jesus will you cheer up? You need to get out more. What was it you said? After the math comes the aftermath? Tell you what. Comic interlude. Okay? Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Mickey Mouse is filing for divorce and the judge looks down and he says: I understand that it is your contention that your wife Minnie Mouse is mentally deranged. Is that correct? And Mickey says: No, Your Honor, that’s not what I said. What I said was she’s fucking nuts.
The Kid stomped around the room holding himself at the waist and laughing his yukking laugh.
You always get everything wrong. What are you laughing at?
Whooh, he gasped. What?
You always get everything wrong. It’s Goofy. It’s not nuts.
What’s the difference?
She was fucking Goofy. You dont even get it.
Yeah, well. We got you. Anyway the point is that you need to snap out of it. What do you think? At the last minute little Bobby Shafto is going to wake from the dead and come and rescue you? Silver buckles on his shoes or whatever the fuck? He’s out of the loop, Louise. Since he duffeled his head in his racing machine.
She looked away. The Kid shaded his eyes with one flipper. Well, he said. That got her attention.
You dont know what you’re talking about.
Yeah? How long’s he been snoozing now? A couple of months?
He’s still alive.
He’s still alive. Oh, well shit. If he’s still alive what the hell. Why dont you come off it? We both know why you’re not sticking around vis-à-vis the fallen one. Dont we? What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?
I’m going to bed.
It’s because we dont know what’s going to wake up. If it wakes up. We both know what the chances are of his coming out of this with his mentis intactus and gutsy girl that you are I dont see you being quite so deeply enamored of whatever vestige might still be lurking there behind the clouded eye and the drooling lip. Well what the hell. You never know what’s in the cards, do you? You’d probably have wound up back in Chitlinland. Just the two of you. Dining on fatback and harmony grits or whatever the fuck it is that they eat down there in the land of the mammyjammer. Not exactly hobnobbing around Europe with the motorcar set but at least it’s quiet.
That’s not going to happen.
I know it’s not going to happen.
Good.
So where do we go from here?
I’ll send you a postcard.
You never did before.
This will be different.
I’ll bet. Are you going to call your grandmother?
And tell her what?
I dont know. Something. Jesus, Jasmine. There’s lots left to do you know.
Maybe. But not by me.
What about the nightgate and the lair of the unspeakables? Not scared of that?
I’ll take my chances. I’m guessing that when I trip the breaker the board goes to black.
We really put ourselves out for you you know.
I’m sorry.
What if I was to tell you stuff I’m not supposed to tell you?
Not interested.
Stuff you really would like to know.
You dont know anything. You just make things up.
Yeah. But some of it’s pretty cool.
Some of it.
How about this: What’s black and white and red all over?
I cant begin to think.
Trotsky in a tuxedo.
