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The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

Cormac McCarthy

Start date: October 27, 2022

Finish date: November 30, 2022

Discussion: Side Reads - Fiction

Discussion leader: Christopher

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Side Reads - Fiction

* Suggest a Fiction Side Read
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Nov 08, 2022 Christopher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american, fiction, 21st-century, favorites, postmodern, great-american-novel, vergangenheitsbewaltigung

"Varied" isn't typically the first word used to describe Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre. After all, I think you could pick any random sentence in the world and I could tell you if McCarthy wrote it or not, and not just because of the lack of punctuation. His writer's DNA is just that potent. But looking back on all of his published work, there's a heckuva lot of variety there.

His career started out as a Faulknerian emulation, chronicling hillbilly tragedies and grotesqueries in The Orchard Keeper, Ou "Varied" isn't typically the first word used to describe Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre. After all, I think you could pick any random sentence in the world and I could tell you if McCarthy wrote it or not, and not just because of the lack of punctuation. His writer's DNA is just that potent. But looking back on all of his published work, there's a heckuva lot of variety there.

His career started out as a Faulknerian emulation, chronicling hillbilly tragedies and grotesqueries in The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark and Child of God. Slight stylistic and thematic twist to Suttree's existential ramblings (more Shakespeare than Faulkner), then a swift righthand turn to philosophical Westerns with Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy. Then pulp fiction in No Country for Old Men, and finally what for a long time seemed like it would be the last thing we'd get from McCarthy: the postapocalyptic father-son tale of The Road, which somehow is simultaneously the bleakest and the most hopeful book he ever wrote. This is not to mention his plays and screenplays and the short stories that are hard to get hold of.

What's great about The Passenger is that it feels like a walking tour through his whole career. Stylistically, this feels most similar to Suttree, with long digressions, a mostly silent protagonist, and a meandering plot, but it also has scenes of carefully described action a la No Country for Old Men or The Road. It's got the philosophically bloviant minor characters of The Border Trilogy. It's set in the same South of his first three books. Heck, it's got straight-up references to Blood Meridian.

But it treads a lot of new ground as well. This may be the biggest leap McCarthy has ever taken, bigger than switching from Southern dreadfuls to Western dreadfuls or apocalypses. I never would have expected McCarthy to write a transgender character in a way that wouldn't embarrass either of us, with grace. I didn't think I'd see characters travel around not only America but also Europe. While I knew McCarthy was interested in mathematics and physics, it was hard for me to imagine how he would fit them into one of his stories; he's always so concerned with life or death circumstances, with the corporeal. But in this book, the science fits with his themes perfectly.

For me, McCarthy has always stood alone. I don't like to imagine him in the modern world, talking to other people. I imagine him cloistered in a monk's cell, lined with bookshelves of Shakespeare and Milton and Melville and whatever other arcane books, spinning out his yarns. But The Passenger had me making a lot of unexpected connections. The structure and paranoia of Pynchon. The dialogue of David Foster Wallace. The family dynamics of Salinger's Glass family, even. I didn't know I wanted McCarthy to be brought down to earth, to be able to be compared with other authors I love. But it works.

This book is definitely not for everyone. It's not going to satisfy you if you're looking for the gripping, pulpy plot of No Country For Old Men, even though it's being advertised similarly. There is the seed of a pulp fiction here, where protagonist Bobby Western, a salvage diver, discovers a sunken airplane that's just covered with mysterious circumstances, but this is no reason to read the book. It's got other things on its mind. The Passenger is basically plotless, but that doesn't mean it's storyless. There's story dripping off the pages; history and tangents and dreams are abundant here. But most of all, there's character.

I have an affinity for shaggy, overgrown and serpentine novels. When it comes to Pynchon, I prefer V. over The Crying of Lot 49. I love the sprawl of Delillo's Underworld to the focused precision of White Noise. Give me the bloated mess of Les Miserables over Dickens's tightly plotted novels any day. And while I love McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Suttree is more suited to my tastes.

So this is the perfect book for me. It feels like a gift McCarthy gave me personally, not to be overly sentimental about it. He could have left me with The Road and I would have been perfectly happy with that, but now he's given me this: a strange, difficult, bloated, wonderful novel. It's perfect for me. (And there's another one coming! December can't come soon enough.) ...more

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Mar 09, 2022 Henk marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: 2024-priority-list

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Mar 09, 2022 Karen Michele Burns marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Jun 11, 2022 Nadine in California marked it as to-read

Jun 28, 2024 Pat marked it as to-read

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