The Passenger Overly Engimatic

 

The Passenger (2022)

By Cormac McCarthy

Alfred A. Knopf, 383 pages.

★★

 

  

The publisher calls The Passenger  “a novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin and the madness that is human consciousness.” That’s both accurate and a tip-off. I am not a Cormac McCarthy newbie. I know that his books are neither breezy nor feel-good reading. What McCarthy always gives us is spectacular and sparkling prose. We certainly get that in The Passenger.

 

What we don’t get is any sort of narrative. Bobby Western is the novel’s central character but you won’t initially know that. In one of the most unorthodox openings in recent literary history, The Passenger opens with a scene that could be a Fellini outtake, a surreal dialogue between a female of indeterminate age and a character called The Thalidomide Kid, who waves his flipper to conduct what appears to be an audition for a twisted carnival or vaudeville routine. This chapter is written in italics and, like the entire book, eschews quotation marks and apostrophes. The non-italicized chapters focus on Bobby, but you won’t learn until about halfway through that the other chapters are about his deceased schizophrenic sister Alicia.

 

When we meet Bobby in 1980, he’s a New Orleans-based salvage diver doing a job in Mississippi. His dive discovers an intact submerged private jet with the pilot and eight passengers strapped in their seats. What he doesn’t find is the flight recorder, the pilot’s bag, or any evidence of the ninth passenger who was supposed to be aboard. Don’t wait for the mystery to resolve. Bobby will be surveilled and harassed by men with badges, but we never learn who they are–FBI? CIA? mobsters?–and the crash itself isn’t even a MacGuffin. We never learn what happened to the plane or why Bobby is under suspicion. This makes the novel’s very title a misnomer.

 

We eventually learn that both Bobby and Alicia were child prodigies, she in math and he in physics. Their father worked on the Manhattan project under Robert Oppenheimer. (If you don’t know his tale, he lost his security clearance because his wife once belonged to the Community Party.) Alicia went to the University of Chicago at age 12, and Bobby dropped out of Cal Tech, drove Formula Two racecars in Europe, and drifted into diving. It is strongly suggested that he and his sister were lovers, but like everything else in the novel, the specifics are murky. All we know is that he splits after the IRS seizes his assets (including his Maserati). He is fine living as a bum-like recluse and spends a lot of time musing about guilt, grief, and spirituality.

 

It's hard, though, to get much handle on a guy whose most repeated comment is, “I don’t know.” He has long conversations with the garrulous John Sheddan and a lawyer named Kline, but these exchanges sound profound but go nowhere. This means many of them–including a long discourse on President Kennedy’s assassination posing as received truth–meander but fail to enlighten. It’s no wonder that one reader compared the novel to Kafka’s The Trial and another to an acid trip. The disconnected ping pong-style conversations put me in mind of the Barry Levinson movie Diner (1982) if he had set it in a graduate student lounge.

 

Insofar as I could determine, The Passenger is an exploration of those who simply don’t fit in society and have to decide whether to engage with the world, exit from it, or go solo. Bobby’s engagement attempts are, to say the least, unorthodox. Those with whom he connects the most include a transgender woman,  a conman, roughnecks, drunks, and misfits cut from different cloth than his own.

 

McCarthy’s prose  is the only salvage job that keeps this novel from being scrap. There are spectacular passages in The Passenger that made me wish he had saved them for a better book. His writing is so good that he has devotees who will praise everything he writes whether or not it makes an iota of sense. I’m a McCarthy fan, but not of this book. My best advice is to visit your local library, pluck this volume from the shelf, and plonk yourself down in a comfy chair. Open to a random page, read a few paragraphs, and repeat several times. Return it to the shelf.

 

Rob Weir