Status Updates From The Passenger

As the saying goes, only death and taxes are certain for Western. The IRS has blocked all his accounts. The hired private eye does an outlook on paperless money and private currencies. State institutions add to the paranoia. Western is increasingly passive, the passenger in his own life. Thalidomide Kid, the split personality from the mind of his sister, visits him for the first time.

McCarthy had to tell what is at the bottom of life. No time to explain. People just show up and leave. All of them are some kind of plain/poor/dumb f***. Conversations mostly don't lead anywhere. Thoughts cannot be controlled. Some of them even might be about what is going on.
Western is on a deserted oil rig. Is he alone? Is he paranoid? Then in the swamps of Florida with an old friend who abandoned society.

Lots of digressions. The book almost is a single digression. A friend turns up for a lunch with Western where he elaborates on a life out of the ordinary. After that, another friend turns up and they discuss state-of-the art physics. Quantum mechanics, string theory, S-matrix theory, bosons, quarks - and the people behind the theory. For 30 pages. McCarthy sure was an erudite man. No mention of the missing passenger.

Did not finish

Difficult to get into the story. McCarthy's writing fitted The Road perfectly. The setting spoke for itself. Here, it hinders my approach. Especially the hallucination parts of the sister put me off. Maybe a good representation but nothing I want to spend the time to feel it. In Bobby's parts, I repeatedly get lost who is speaking. The passenger challenges my limit of what I can handle in English language.