Reviewed for Library Journal: https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-passenger-2169761. Pretty excellent.

I love Cormac McCarthy and enjoyed this book--at times. However, it is a dense and difficult book and took a lot of dedication on my part to finish it. Readers should be aware of this before giving it a go.

I selected this and its part 2, Stella Maris, for the June and July book club selections for my library's adult fiction book club. Some parts of this book I absolutely loved but overall, it's a bit of a mess which is very unlike McCarthy. There are lengthy passages musing about mathematics, physics, and things like the JFK assassination. There isn't much of a plot and none of the loose ends are tied up even by the end of book 2 which doesn't bother me but the book club ladies were very put off by it.

In 2005 James Wood in The New Yorker wrote, “To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose.” Now eighty-nine, McCarthy’s two new novels—at least on the surface—focus on the tragic relationship between a brother and sister, Bobby and Alicia (Alice) Western. The first, The Passenger, is novel-length and the second (much shorter text), Stella Maris, is structured as a series of therapy sessions between Alicia and her psychiatrist at the psychiatric facility where she has committed herself for the third and tragically final time.

You can read my full review in the Dec/Jan 2023 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Excellent prose with no discernible plot. This piece of work is closer to a seemingly endless vignette with a fascinating flow to its descriptiveness.

A typical Cormac McCarthy read. Set in the future, has mankind sunk to a new low ? Emotional and haunting.
A book that makes you think !

I am a Cormac McCarthy fan and so would have a hard time criticizing any of his work even if it wasn't my personal favorite, but luckily this newest novel duo (The Passenger and Stella Maris) did not disappoint. Strange, heartbreakingly sad, sharp, and at times viciously funny. While I believe the story of Bobby Western is elusive and ends unclearly, I was still very moved by the study of those haunted by a loved ones suicide.

Cormac McCarthy is an artist. He paints the most intriguing characters and landscapes with sparse, but perfect word choice. After reading The Passenger, I believe he's reached his abstract Picaso-esque period. I have no idea how to review this book, so I'll just share some thoughts. It begins as a mystery, as salvage diver Bobby Western finds the remains of an airplane that has crashed and rests under water. There is a body missing from the wreckage, as well as the pilot's flight bag. It's obvious from the start that there is a cover-up happening and I was settling in to read this intriguing mystery/thriller. But then the narrative takes a Kafka-esque left turn. I followed the ride, with no idea where it was going or what I was reading. I finished the book and had no idea how to reconcile my thoughts about it.

I'd say it is more of a character study, with ruminations about physics, faith, love, mental health. This is all mixed together with a loose plot line of Bobby Western travelling through the south, meeting up with old friends, and trying to avoid the men in suits that seem to have targeted him. The book is filled with long conversations between characters. Some are funny, some are philosophical, some are debates about physics and math. There are imaginary characters mixed in as well. I found it all a little hard to follow. I love Cormac McCarthy, but I really felt like he pulled out the thesaurus and tried to fit as many unusual words as he could into the narrative. It took away from the ease of reading the book, if that makes any sense.

I am not going to recommend this book one way or another. Those who want to read it will read it. I don't think that it's going to be a book that someone will just pick up for a light read at the airport. I will definitely read the second book, Stella Maris, because I hope it will clear up some of the confusion from the first book. Also... it is Cormac McCarthy, after all. I suppose when it comes down to it, I will read anything he writes because he is an amazing artist. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I’m a fan of McCarthy’s books but I honestly was totally confused from page one until I got a quarter of the way through and still was confused. The book doesn’t have much plot to hold my interest.

My grandmother was younger than I am now when Cormac McCarthy published his first novel. In the time since, he's solidified his reputation as one of the last living heirs to the Southern Gothic tradition of American literature, a foster son to Faulkner, O'Connor, Dickey, and others. With last week's release of McCarthy's first book in over 15 years, one of the living literary giants has made this much clear: If in the five decades since his debut you think you know Cormac McCarthy, you'd be dead wrong.

Much like many of McCarthy's novels, The Passenger begins enigmatically. But unlike many of McCarthy's novels, it begins with an overtly religious (though ironic) scene. A beautiful young woman, dead at her own hands, hangs from a tree on a snowy Christmas night. The man who finds her body regards her like a statue in a church. He pauses in reverence before kneeling for a moment in prayer. The life and significance of this improbable saint is just one of many mysteries that imbue the pages ahead.
The narrative alternates between the lives of two siblings. The main storyline follows Robert Western, a salvage diver in New Orleans. Extended flashbacks follow the last days of the girl found dead, Western's sister Alicia. Their parents met while working on the Manhattan Project and died prematurely as a result of that hazardous work. Both brother and sister are also, in their own strange ways, far-flung victims of the atomic bomb. Western wanders through life listlessly, haunted by his family's contribution to such destruction; Alicia's tale chronicles her prolonged, bizarre conversations with the voices in her head, a menagerie of vaudevillian freaks. She inherited her family's intelligence and, she believes, the nuclear-induced genetic abnormalities that caused her schizophrenia. McCarthy seems to suggest that the destruction caused by atomic weapons may have begun at Hiroshima, but it didn't end there.
Lacking his sister's genius, Western has long since abandoned his own study of physics. He spends his time idling through life, working odd jobs, living off an implausible inheritance, and brooding over life's deepest questions. He's a modern Hamlet in Dixieland. Like his Danish counterpart, he's both indecisive and inordinately fixated on a female family member. His affection for Alicia is frequently described as incestuous, though his feelings are something entertained from afar. She remains for him a kind of muse. Not unlike the children in a Salinger story, Alicia endures as a symbol for things Western can't really name: innocence, purity, or perhaps genius.
Like protagonists in McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and The Road, Western finds himself caught in a conflict for which there is no ultimate explanation. He is hired to dive and examine a plane crash off the Louisiana coast, and though there is no sign of exit from the wreck, one passenger is missing, as is the plane's black box. Later, his threadbare apartment is ransacked before he is approached at a bar by two men in suits with questions about the scientists who worked with his father. It gets stranger still.

These conspicuous dots stand in need of connection. In his feeble attempts to explain whatever or whoever is behind these happenings, Western seeks out a private investigator who becomes more of a confidant than a hired hand. The two men's prolonged conversation about the JFK assassination is a microcosm of Western's immediate problems: What, if anything, can connect all these occurrences in Western's life? Is there a narrative that can tie everything together? And of course, those questions are themselves microcosms of Western's real existential worries: Does anything connect this happenstance universe we live in? For all the advances in science, are we really any closer to comprehending the deep-down things that make and uphold this fragile world?
In our quest to make sense of things, McCarthy wants to first take seriously the lack of sense in the world. In that vein, McCarthy invites comparisons to another Southern writer, Walker Percy. Like Percy, McCarthy's most recent novels express concern with apocalyptic evil and the place of good, if flawed, men in a world that often seems absurd and cruel. The Passenger is no exception. Perhaps there are signs in the world that help us answer the question of evil and the good man's place in front of it. But as Percy once said addressing a different question, the signs are ambiguous.
One place to explore those deeper questions is the world of dreams, which features prominently in The Passenger. And though McCarthy hasn't published a novel in nearly two decades, he hasn't been silent. His 2017 essay "The Kekulé Problem" concerns, among other things, the way that the subconscious imagination informs our conscious reasoning. The 19th century chemist August Kekulé puzzled over the molecular structure of benzene for some time before having a dream about a snake eating its own tail. His subconscious imagination prompted his conscious insight that the benzene molecule must be circular.
McCarthy's interest in the anecdote has less to do with the science than it does with the nature of our imagination. In brief flashes, the subconscious seems to want to help us solve our problems and make sense of mysteries. But in The Passenger, dreams cloud rather than clarify. Western has several dreams throughout the novel, each of which draws attention to his problems instead of solving them. If dreams can help delineate the structure of a molecule, perhaps dreams can also give us signposts to guide us through existential problems. But for Western as for us, those signs are ambiguous.

All that said, for a novel that has as much theoretical mathematics as previous McCarthy novels had bloodshed, one question remains: Does such a novel work? The answer here is also ambiguous. Novels that deal first with big ideas and only then populate those ideas with characters and a plotline almost always fail. McCarthy unequivocally avoids that trap. The best stories are driven by strong characters, and here The Passenger succeeds as well as any other. But if the book's plane wreck was missing a passenger, the conspicuous stowaway in this novel is the heavy intellectual baggage that clearly occupied McCarthy's mind while writing. McCarthy has written a very good book, and at nearly 90 years old he's one of the only Americans to ever do so at such an advanced age. But The Passenger might be too cerebral for even more dedicated readers, and McCarthy only rarely dips into the hypnotizing prose for which he will be remembered.
Curious to see if The Passenger stood on its own, I decided to review this book without reading its sequel, Stella Maris, forthcoming in December. If its merits are anything like those of its twin, Stella Maris will point toward those deep-down, hidden things that come to the surface only in dreams and, perhaps, in great stories. It will hopefully give, as only great literature can give, signs and guideposts to help make sense of life's deepest questions. As McCarthy would doubtless agree, however, the signs are ambiguous.

As with some of this author’s previous novels, he explores loneliness and grief as well as mental illness, religious beliefs, and inherited culpability. I know I would benefit from reading this novel a second and even a third time as it begs to be read carefully. His descriptions are fantastic and his mood setting is amazing. There are so many profound thoughts to be highlighted and reread.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alfred A Knopf Publishing for the ARC to read and review.

I am a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. He has written some amazing books and is intensely literary in all the best ways. But this novel defeated me. I could not get into it. I gave up about a quarter of the way in.

I don't know that this reflects on the book as much as it speaks to where I am as a reader right now, but still...I didn't finish. I am going to wait a bit and try again. I'll update this review after the second try.

This is destined to be another classic, Thought provoking with characters and events that truly resonated. Highly recommend.

I give up on books before finishing them extremely rarely, and normally I would not even consider writing a review under those circumstances. But this was an Advance Reader's Copy, and I feel duty-bound to say something about it. My Kindle reader says I was 27% through the book when I decided to give up on it.

The protagonist of the novel is Bobby Western, a salvage diver based in New Orleans. But each of the chapters begins with a monologue by his sister (who he is in love with, and is already dead when the novel begins). They are actually dialogs between her and the group of hallucinations who follow her around, which is so surreal that it was hard to know what to make of them. The novel begins with a salvage dive in the middle of the night. It's a private jet with nine drowned passengers inside and no apparent damage. The pilot's flight bag, the black box, and a tenth passenger are all missing.

Bobby finds no mention of the crash in the news (how did the Coast Guard even know it was there?), nor can he discover who hired the salvage divers. So many mysteries: he can't stop himself from looking into them, if only to satisfy his own curiosity. It's an interesting setup, but the narrative was moving so slowly (and so much time was spent describing daily encounters with a cast of only marginally interesting New Orleans acquaintances), that I simply lost interest.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

THE PASSENGER
Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
ISBN 9780307268990
Hardcover
Fiction

Let us start with a bit of the backstory of THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s last novel, THE ROAD, was published in 2006. Many readers at that time wondered what, if anything, might be next from him. Rumors followed intermittently. News finally trickled out that McCarthy was working on a new novel titled THE PASSENGER about mathematics. A page appeared briefly on Amazon shortly thereafter, offering the book for presale, but it quickly vanished. No further word occurred, other than expressions of yearning and wistfulness concerning the new book’s failure to appear, until March 8, 2022, when Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., McCarthy’s longtime and extremely patient publisher, announced THE PASSENGER would be published on October 25, 2022, while a second novel (described elsewhere as a sequel/prequel/coda to THE PASSENGER) titled STELLA MARIS would follow. The first part of that promise is now fulfilled and it is everything one might have hoped for. 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.

THE PASSENGER has been described by biologist David Krakauer as “McCarthy 3.0.” Just so. McCarthy certainly brings his familiar and unique stylistic form to THE PASSENGER, including the absence of quotation marks, the rareness of attribution, incomparable descriptions, and extended conversations that plumb the personality essence of each of the principal compelling characters. What is different here from McCarthy’s other work is the substance. THE PASSENGER is quite different topically from what McCarthy has heretofore written for the masses. Here, he emphasizes analysis and science to a greater degree than is normally found in modern literature of a genre or otherwise. What is absent, meanwhile, is the violence found in McCarthy’s other novels, though the attendant sorrow of the human experience is certainly present.

Onto the story itself. The narrative alternates in point of view between Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister who are also would-be lovers. We meet Alicia first in 1973, the year of her death. Alicia shares her occasional spotlight in acerbic conversations with a gentleman she calls The Thalidimyde Kid, who in turn is accompanied by a bizarre and revolving cast of hangers-on. Alicia possesses an extremely high-order intelligence with regard to mathematics and an interest to match to the extent that it leaves her virtually no time for other concerns. The Kid for his part makes his appearances wherever Alicia happens to be. The Kid locates Alicia with such skill that it seems clear that he actually exists only in her imagination though one can never be sure, even as they goad each other at length..

THE PASSENGER, however, belongs primarily to Bobby, a diver in the middle of a salvage operation in 1980 near Pass Christian, Mississippi, where he is tasked with investigating the reported crash of a passenger plane in the Gulf of Mexico. He locates the submerged but otherwise undamaged plane easily enough, as well as more than a reasonable share of enigmas of the locked door mystery type. These include the seemingly impossible absences from the plane of the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and a passenger. Bobby’s discovery causes him multiple difficulties in his hometown of New Orleans. He is barely dried off from the dive before mysterious strangers appear and begin questioning him about what he found. That would be bad enough, but they also commence an investigation into his sparse, deceptively simple life. Bobby has a wide and deep field of knowledge, particularly in physics, but he does not have the answers to the questions being asked of him. Things begin to unravel for him in the gradual then sudden way that Ernest Hemingway described the acceleration of bankruptcy. Bobby’s troubles also begin to dramatically affect his quirky and memorable friends, acquaintances, and associates. The situation prompts him to retain a shadowy private investigator who has some potential solutions to Bobby's increasingly severe difficulties, though they are not the answers that Bobby wants. They ultimately, however, are just what he needs. Perhaps. When and if Bobby starts will be his salvation, if he does not wait too long.

Some parts of THE PASSENGER can be rough sledding. McCarthy drops conversational depth charges of information into the extended dialogues and which occasionally include words and phrases familiar to mathematicians and physicists but unknown, I daresay, to the public in general. The scientific discussions, however, somehow never bog the narrative down. The obscure terms and concepts presented are for the most part amenable to comprehension (at least minimally) with a few moments of research. The definitions of others may well leave the reader (particularly this one) quickly at sea, though wiser, if wisdom is the accumulation of knowing what one does not know. Please note that McCarthy is not showing off here. The multiple exposures to the pure scientific concepts found within these pages hint at a deeper story that enhances the primary one being presented. There is as well grim laugh-out-loud humor a-plenty scattered in the tales of war, death, and love that can be found here. McCarthy attempts and succeeds in covering all of the bases of human activity within THE PASSENGER while skipping lightly across the mystery, science fiction, thriller, and even romantic literary genres while not lingering too long in those kingdoms. It instead carves out its own unassailable fiefdom.

So what is left for McCarthy to tell in the forthcoming STELLA MARIS? Alicia gets her own star turn in that book, which at this point is scheduled to appear on December 9. Perhaps STELLA MARIS will answer some of the questions left unanswered at the conclusion of THE PASSENGER. It may, however, raise even more. In either case, the first volume of this major work is required and unforgettable reading, one that will make you even more impatient to encounter its companion.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2022, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

The writing style is a bit different and at times you're not sure what the point is before it wanders off somewhere else and then at times it did keep you wanting to know more, but then it doesn't culminate in anything substantial. For a book that sounded like it would be about a conspiracy and a thriller, it had more academic dialogue than expected, with a lot of math and physics references involved. Readers who enjoy a meandering philosophical book will like this one, but those looking for a definitive ending may not.

Not one, but TWO new Cormac McCarthy novels in the fall of 2022?! When I came across the article, the first place I went to was NetGalley! A HUGE thank you to Knopf DoubleDay and NetGalley for an opportunity to read the first novel “The Passenger” to be released on October 25th. The second novel “Stella Maris” set 8 years later from “The Passenger” will be released on November 22nd. Both novels tell the grand story of Bobby and Alicia Western.

I have read all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, I am a huge fan, that being said… Passengers is not as accessible as “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men”

When we sit down to read a McCarthy novel, I know from the start that is going to be smarter than me, smarter than most of us in all likelihood.
With Passengers, I knew there was symbolism and allegories of grief, but had a hard time discerning the theme specifically. The plot was spelled out in the synopsis, which sounds very intriguing! Also, the first chapter builds on the synopsis, but then the rest of the book, descends into meandering prose. Again, I may not be smart enough to figure it out, if you are a longtime reader of McCarthy I absolutely suggest reading. In fact if you are a longtime reader, you do not need me to tell you the brilliance of the author. If you are new to Cormac McCarthy, I would suggest starting with “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” I would also suggest doing some research on some of his themes and symbolism, I feel it adds to the enjoyment of his brilliant novels.

Thank you for reading my hopefully not too meandering review. Even though I found “The Passenger” a little tough to make through, I am still glad I read it, and will pick up both novels in hardcover this fall. CM is a brilliant author, and I hope to understand his novels more with my research.

Thanks for reading!

I was hooked in the opening chapter when Western, a deep sea diver, finds a mysterious wreckage in the waters. The mystery is left hanging though and we are left to follow Western on his meaningless wanderings. He is all doom and gloom, and never deviates or changes throughout the story. There were many tangents that felt like little rants from the author. The writing was beautiful - I wish there was a plot though

The premise sounded excellent. A salvage diver and his partner discover a private jet sunk with the doors still latched but a passenger and the black box missing. Shortly thereafter, the partner mysteriously dies on another salvage dive and Western, our main character is being hunted by some sort of federal authority. From that intriguing opening, we suddenly diverge into Western's genius sister's madness and suicide, his love for his sister, the guilt he feels about his father's role in helping to create nuclear bombs in WWII and his many offbeat friends and his relationship to each of them. Delusional passages supposedly from his sister's mind? diary? are overlong and do nothing to add to readers understanding of what actually happened to her. The book rambles on and on and we never get back to the opening scene of the sunken private jet. Supposedly, we will get answers in Volume two due out in December 2022. I for one will not be waiting for volume two as it took hours of tedious reading to make it through this tome. For McCarthy fans only.

The premise of this book is fascinating. A salvage diver, Bobby, and his partner discover a plane with the black box and one passenger missing. Shortly thereafter, federal agents appear to question Bobby, trash his place, and threaten him. His partner is killed on another dive, and Bobby hits the road to avoid suffering the same fate.

The other story that run through the book is about his genius sister who struggled with mental illness before succumbing to suicide. We are pulled inside her hallucinations which feature The Thalidomide Man who has severe birth defects from in-utero exposure to the drug.

As their stories unfold, we learn more and more about the forbidden romance between the siblings that haunts Bobby, as does his father's part in the creation of the nuclear bombs used in World War II. Bobby becomes a recluse, his mind filled with his regrets, grief, and pain. The plane passenger is a distant part of the story while at the same time being what drives Bobby to seclusion.

This book is overly long, and the passages with Alisa and Thalidomide Man are excruciatingly so. We do get a window into her mind, but the scenes go on and on and the lengthy conversations with seemingly little point become tedious.

The overall tone of this book is sadness and depression. As is typical with McCarthy, this is not a light read. While The Passenger leaves us hanging until the release of Stella Maris, I have to wonder if it will also be long-winded or worth the time investment. I will read it but with lowered expectation.

In sum, a compelling premise that needs at least one hundred pages cut.