Fellowship Point: Quakers, Conflict, and Friendship

 

FELLOWSHIP POINT (2023)

By Alice Elliott Dark

Simon and Schuster, 578 pages

★★★★ ½ 

 

 

It has been said that Quakers came to do good and did well. In a roundabout way, that’s the crux of Fellowship Point, a superb new novel by Alice Elliott Dark.

 

Its central character is Agnes Lee who did well indeed in her inheritance and as author of a series of children’s books about 9-year-old Nan, whose adventures are reminiscent of a better-behaved Eloise. Agnes has remained mum about the inspiration for Nan. Her lifelong friend Polly Wister always imagined it was her daughter Lydia, who died at nine.

 

Much of the novel is about the friendship between Agnes and Polly, though it’s not easy being Agnes’s friend. Agnes is an opinionated crank with secrets, is a confirmed spinster, and unbeknown even to Polly also writes under the pseudonym of Pauline Schultz. Those books are arch takedowns of Rittenhouse Square elites, though the Lees could be counted among them. As is often the case, those who lampoon miss the irony that they “have met the enemy and they is us,” as Pogo would have put it.

 

Agnes is also the fulcrum of another irony in that old Quaker money is behind the novel’s namesake dilemma: what to do with Fellowship Point. Several generations ago, five families bought 35 acres of coastal land in Maine, where they summered amidst locals. The latter are a mix of those who provide services joyfully, those who do so grudgingly, and those who want no part of outsiders.

 

Themes of native Mainers versus summer people are commonplace in literature, but Dark twists an old meme via a plot device that blurs who’s right and who’s wrong. Agnes and Polly, both in their 80s, want the Point and the wild “Sank” to become a public trust. That’s tricky as the original charter stipulates that three of the five families that own the land must vote to dissolve their association before anything else can be done with it. Agnes never married, so no problem there, but obstacles loom.

 

Polly likes the idea, but she’s passive in more than the Quaker opposition to war. She kowtows to her husband Dick, an embittered retired UPenn philosophy professor denied emeritus status. Agnes thinks he’s a pompous lightweight but tries to hold her tongue for Polly’s sake. His legacy will complicate matters and strain old friendships. Various cousins also have a say, including Archie, who is married to the unspeakably vain and manipulative Seela. There is also a development team that envisions an upscale resort, and Polly’s three sons, especially James, a smug (and greedy?) version of his father. It's difficult for locals to stay clear of this brewing tempest, including  Robert Circumstance who has tended the grounds for years and is a skilled landscape designer who has made Fellowship Point elegant.

 

As if Agnes doesn't have enough to navigate, she has a medical crisis and is being badgered by Maud Silver, an editorial assistant who hopes to advance her flagging career by convincing Agnes to write her memoir. That's about the last thing she wants to do! Maud also has baggage. Few know that she’s a single mom to a nine-year-old, or that her mother Heidi is in a catatonic state. Colleagues observe that Maud goes home earlier than anyone else, which is blood to sharks in New York publishing.

 

The novel spans the years 1961 to 2008 and is infused with many of the crises and highlights of those years, including Kennedy’s assassination, 9/11, and Barack Obama’s election. The past and present similarly collide, clash, and sometimes resolve among Dark’s characters. There's a lot going on in the book including the often-conflicting bonds between biological and intentional families and how one defines ownership, friendship, and love. Intertwined are a few mysteries and a wild card scenario in the Mainers versus summer people dilemma that redefines public and private spaces.

 

I really liked this novel, though it would be fair commentary to say that Dark is sometimes too ambitious for her own good. This causes her to trade in a few too many “coincidences.” Though Dark leavens her tale with humor, these sometimes stretch credulity. Still, Agnes is very memorable, even though she is fusty and obdurate. She put me in mind of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge: hard on the outside with soft spots hidden inside. Ultimately, Fellowship Point is a bit like the Quakers in that goodwill and right intentions prevail.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Edvard Munch at the Clark Will Surprise you

 

Edvard Munch–Trembling Earth

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, MA

Through October 15, 2023

[Click for full-sized images]

 

 

Do you recognize the above image? Of course you do; The Scream is one of the most famous images in Western art history. Perhaps you’re wondering why it’s not in color like the one you used to hang in your college dorm room around finals time. Contrary to popular myth, artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) made several versions of this 1893 work, including woodcuts and drawings. The one you see is part of a new exhibition of 75 Munch works at the Clark.

 

 

How about this next painting? It’s also Munch and it doesn’t really fit with perceptions that the Norwegian Munch was a painter whose acid greens and subdued colors reflected the gloomy nature of the artist. You’re not wrong to think Munch was often wracked by anxiety, but that was not the full measure of the man. As an adult, he admitted that his formative years were marked by “sickness, insanity, and death.” He also studied nihilism, lived in a climate that could be foreboding, and battled depression. Yet he also found great beauty and inspiration in nature. That’s the central concept of Trembling Earth and, if you want to see it, you have to go to Williamstown, Massachusetts, as the Clark is the only place it will be on view.

 

 

The exhibit is arranged in six rooms themed by things that inspired Munch, including the forest, cultivated land, and seascapes. As such, the only other iconic work you’ll see is a version of Ashes (above). What will surprise most attendees, though, is that, though many Munch efforts are suffused with the weaker light of Scandinavia, his overall palette was frequently brighter and more vivid than you might have thought. 

 

 

 Munch spent much of his time in Oslo–called Kristiana in his day–but he also had a country home 100 kilometers south of the city. His home was surrounded by flowers and orchards were filled with fruits. In short, Munch had a deep appreciation for the natural world. 

 

Starry Night 

 

Two Horses

 

 To be sure, his world was rocked by the death of a beloved sister and the postmortem revelation that his father left behind crippling debt but there were also stimulating experiences. He traveled to Berlin on occasion, but a key moment came when he went to Paris in 1889, the year the world’s fair showcased the then-new Eiffel Tower. That didn’t inspire Munch nearly as much as Impressionism and paintings he saw from a failed Dutch expatriate: Vincent Van Gogh. Bet you didn’t know that Munch also painted a canvas titled Starry Night. You can also see Impressionism’s impact on Munch in the thickness of the paint he knifed onto some of his paintings.

 

Note continuation of hair into beach and sky

 

Munch was not really an Impressionist (nor was Van Gogh.) His work is generally lumped with Expressionism–especially German art and late Van Gogh–and Symbolists like Paul Gauguin. A quick primer: Impressionism focuses on light, Expressionism on inner feelings, and Symbolism on the mystical. And, yes, they often overlap. Munch often painted human figures from behind or as stylized. I’ve often wondered if that’s because he wasn’t particularly good with realistic faces, but that’s pure speculation on my part.  

 

Melancholy

 

Two Women

 

As for the tortured Munch, he obtained fame and money around 1902, but it didn’t serve him well. He drank too much, brawled, and had a nervous breakdown in 1908. Anxiety and melancholy make frequent appearances in his art and even benign titles such as Two Women evokes Egon Schiele’s Death and the Maiden. Munch lived through the 1918 flu epidemic and worried that the Nazis would confiscate his art during World War II. When the latter did not happen and fascist collaborators held a political funeral for Munch who died just before the war ended, rumors circulated that Munch was a sympathizer. That view is soaked in more doubt than evidence. 

 

 

 

 

We do know, though, that Munch struggled to maintain mental stability. The above painting  might give tongue-in-cheek confirmation of his imbalance in that he painted nude bathers at the seaside. Swimming naked in Norway? It was considered healthful. And you thought diving into the waters of Maine was crazy! Some of these works are actually Expressionist in character; others a nod to precocious Post-Impressionists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, another artist Munch admired.

 

It may be a stretch to force fit Munch into a framework of 21^st century environmentalism, but the skinny is that Trembling Earth challenges us to reconsider what we think of Munch. You would do well to make travel plans that include a trip to the Clark.   

 

Rob Weir

Women Talking is Powerful and Brilliant

WOMEN TALKING (2022)

Directed by Sarah Polley

United Artists Releasing, 104 minutes, PG-13 (themes of rape and violence)

★★★★★

 

 

Women Talking was a highly acclaimed but little seen Oscar Best Picture nominee. Make no mistake; it certainly deserved more consideration for Best Picture than the video game tripe that actually won. (Director Sarah Polley did win for Best Adapted Screenplay.)

 

Polley has largely forsaken acting for the director’s chair (Away From Her; Alias Grace). Although it might not seem immediately apparent, Women Talking is a deeply feminist and political film that confirms the buzz that Polley is one of the brightest and boldest of her generation. It is what one might get by mashing together The Handmaid’s Tale, The Trojan Women, and a Mennonite community from hell. It really is about Mennonites, a good starting point for discussing Polley’s brash and brilliant film. You might think it a cheap shot to attack a group of communal Anabaptists, but what you see on the screen is based on a lightly fictionalized account from ex-Mennonite Miriam Toews whose community in Bolivia saw male members secretly administer animal tranquilizers to rape females aged 3 to 65. (Another in Manitoba also had such cases.) In Women Talking, the women aver pacifism, but many of the men fall short of that lofty goal.

 

The camera pans a young woman who awakes to injuries and an STD from a sexual assault. This time, though, her mother Salome (Claire Foy) storms a holding area where several men await transfer to jail, scythe in hand. She is subdued by female elders, but readily admits her willingness to kill. While most of the remaining men journey to an unnamed city to arrange bail, 11 leading women—many of whom have no idea of who fathered their children–gather to decide whether to practice Christian forgiveness, stay and fight back, or leave and create a new community. Women are not taught to read and write, but they vote by making an X on a large sheet of paper. Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand, one of the film’s co-producers) and Mariche (Jessie Buckley) lead the status quo but are vastly outnumbered. The problem, though, is a dead tie between stay-and-fight led by Salome and Mejal (Michele McLeod) and those who feel they must leave to retain their pacifism, including Agata (Judith Ivey) and Greta (Sheila McCarthy). Ona (Rooney Mara) also leans in that direction, though she harbors idealistic notions of building a community of love either within or outside the community. 

 

The women do as the title suggests: talk. They appoint sweet-tempered August (Ben Whishaw) as their chronicler as they weigh the options. He is the community teacher (boys only) who comes from an ex-communicated family and failed as a farmer. He is also deeply in love with Ona and she with him, though she carries a child via her own rape. There is also a transgender character in the film: Melvin (August Winter, who is non-binary), who presents as a man and has spoken only to children after being sexually assaulted.

 

If you think that debate is a blood sport, you’ve never had one with women wrestling with how best to express their faith. Heated, yes, but enveloped within beliefs based upon how to attain the Kingdom of God. Like Ona, they must decide whether that is best accomplished by staying or leaving. Two events will tip the scales.

 

Polley takes us inside a world most of us will never experience. Her direction, supplemented by a superb original score from Icelandic cellist and composer Hilda Guðandóttir (and an assist from The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”) that adds to the otherworldly ambience. Polley’s greatest achievement though, was what she wrung from her cast. If you only know Claire Foy from her role as a young Queen Elizabeth, her fiery anger and grit will surprise, but Jessie Buckley is her equal–though initially they hold opposing views. Sheila McCarthy is better known in Canada, but she’s an absolute delight as a thoughtful grandmotherly type who likes to expound upon what she has learned from her horses and isn’t afraid to screw on a wry smile and admit when she has misjudged. She is the balm to Ivey’s reason and impatience. None, though, surprise like Rooney Mara. You might not initially recognize her in her dimpled-face innocence and the depth she exudes in a soft-spoken almost ethereal role.

 

Brava to Sarah Polley. Women Talking is a triumph.

 

Rob Weir 

 

 

 

 

 

Night of the Living Rez

 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ (2022)

By Morgan Talty

Tin House, 278 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

Night of the Living Rez is the debut work from Penobscot author Morgan Talty. It consists of 12 linked short stories narrated by David—nicknamed Dee–as a youth, an adolescent, and a young man. It is mostly set on a Penobscot reservation in Maine.

 

Before going further, let me say that indigenous writers should be free to tell their stories as they see fit. There are, however, disconnects for non-indigenous readers. Talty often uses non- or barely-translated Penobscot terms. Given that Talty opts for phonetic spellings, it is very difficult to find out more from online Penobscot dictionaries. Many readers, though, may experience more difficulty in making the links that Talty intends because of the book’s short-story format. Had it been a linear novel, the timeframes in which the stories unfold would be easier to locate. More importantly, we could more easily trace David’s evolution.

 

David’s mother left her non-Native husband and has taken up with Frick, who is a bundle of contradictions. He serves as a teacher of what he thinks of as the old ways, though it’s clear that reservation (“rez”) youth and a considerable part of its adult population are more modern (and troubled) than traditional. That includes Frick, who struggles with alcohol. When a strange container (“In a Jar”) shows up under the doorstep Frick declares it “bad medicine,” smudges the entire house, and pins “good” medicine bundles on David, his pregnant sister Paige, and his partner. They mostly think it itches and abandon them. He is often a good step-dad, but sometimes a bad one prone to taking off. When angry he calls David, “little white-boy,” a slam on his paternity. The overall image is that Frick would like to be a Native version of Superman, but he’s too flawed on a personal level and stuck in a bygone values system he can’t maintain even for himself. Traditional ways show up mainly in residual folk beliefs in sprites and spirits, but their mentions appear more reflexive than serious.

 

There is humor interspersed in the collection, especially in the opening tale “Burn.” David is an adolescent in this one who hangs out with his methadone center buddy Fellis. One winter’s night Fellis falls asleep on his way home and his hair is frozen to the ice. The only way to free him is for David to cut off his hair. He remarks, “I never thought I’d scalp a fellow tribe member.” Funny, but also emblematic of a rez filled with social problems of many varieties.

 

As we later learn, by the time he has left childhood—after quitting school—David lives with Fellis and his mother. David’s own mother has many problems of her own, including a seizure disorder, but from Talty’s telling, just about everyone struggles on the rez, be it from discrimination, lack of money, booze, or drugs. Especially the latter. This includes David, who joins Fellis and other mates JP (Jay Pitch) and Tyson in popping pills, including Ativan and “pins” (Klonopin). The drug of choice on the rez is tobacco. Smoking begins in childhood and most of it in the form of cigarettes rather than in rituals. David also engages in some adolescent hijinks such as breaking a bar window, but mostly avoids the serious transgressions of out-of-control Fellis such as serious assaults or a failed robbery of the reservation’s museum whose objective was to sell tribal artifacts to Antiques Roadshow.

 

It is not until near the end of the book that we learn of a deeper source of David’s pain, but he would have had a hard life even without that trauma. On the rez there’s not enough of anything except distress. Meals are often either fast food or scavenged foods such as fiddleheads and moose meat. It’s where people hunt porcupines to sell to a woman who harvests the quills for ceremonial costumes. How’s that for irony? Desperate people need the $20 that she uses to make vestments that honor Native life. In the moving story “Earth Speak” an older David writes, “this reservation was for the dead.”

 

Night of the Living Rez is probably funnier to insiders than me, but it’s hard not to note that the book’s title is a spinoff of the 1968 George Romero movie Night of the Living Dead. It’s often considered the first modern zombie movie. Make of that what you will.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Summer World Music Listening

 

If you’re like me, summertime is when you throttle down and maybe try a few new things. This column features world music offerings, many of them from musicians based in Barcelona. I justify this by saying that it’s a seacoast city, so if you’re bold you can  load some of these artists onto your favorite music delivery device and give them a metaphorical test drive. Will you like them? Probably not all of them, but why not branch out a little? 

 

 

 

Vanessa Bissiri is Italian, but now lives in Barcelona, a hotbed of contemporary jazz. Hers is sometimes called “neon jazz,” a fusion form that blends the swaying Mediterranean feel of the 1970s with more recent trends. “C’è sempre il mare” is an example. It’s decidedly in the softer “cool jazz” idiom, but her voice hints that she might also be able to walk across the avenue into a pop club and hold her own there. “Se perfuma y toma mast,” which is roughly about a dandy who smells good but drinks, finds Bissini singing in the seams of quirky beats. These are two offerings from her recent album Empatica (“Empathetic”) and are typical of the whole.

 

 

 

For a different Catalán experience try Clavellina D’Aire, the stage name of two music teachers, Cati Plana (diatonic accordion) and Jordi Macaya (viola). They prefer folk stylings, but again in an airy, light style. Their album Musiques per emportar-se a iles desertes translates music to carry away to deserted islands, akin to the similar English idiom. It’s a nonsensical phrase if you truly consider it (where would you get batteries or electricity on a deserted island?), but Clavellina D’Aire could definitely provide some chill-out sounds to help you calm down. I recommend them for relaxing on non-deserted beaches. Try the combo of “Pròleg/La Tosca,” the first café-like and the second brighter and traipsing. If you like their keep-things-simple approach as much as I, you can find a half hour concert on YouTube. Appropriately, they perform in a sunny park with children playing quietly and adults doing nothing much in particular. You can readily see, though, that these are two talented people, something that needs no translation. I especially enjoy the way Macaya flirts with discordant notes without actually crossing over. He also has a capable singing voice I find infectious.  

 

 

 

How about a flamenco guitarist in a highbrow vein? Feliu Gasull has released Pit roig (“red breast”), an album that will have appeal to fellow string wizards. The title track showcases Gasull’s talent. “Caminet” is also typical of his more classical touch. A hora is a circle dance that’s often exuberant. Gasull, though, opts for a quiet approach to “Hora Baixa.” Sample before you purchase, though, as this is cerebral material that won’t be everyone’s cup of chocolate caliente.

 

 

The name Laura Downes might ring a bell for National Public Radio listeners. She hosts the world music show AMPLIFY, on which she sometimes showcases female musicians of color. She is of Jamaican/Russian heritage, was born in San Francisco, and raised in Europe. If you don’t know her, though, don’t expect her own music to bop like Afropop or even come close to rocking out; she’s a classical pianist. Her latest recording, Love at Last, has nearly two dozen tracks but don’t anticipate from their titles. Folk music, for example, is replete with songs titled “Tree of Life,” but none of have the same take as hers. Nor should you expect an offering such as “Blessing” to sound either anthemic or balladic. It’s a frenzied trip up and down the white keys that’s a loosely structured composition that drifts toward atonality. Downes is impressive, though I confess that her work–like Gasull’s–impresses me more than it attracts me.

 

 

 

If you’ve had enough of the quiet stuff, slide into the evening with something that falls into the rowdy and stomping category. Barcelona is, after all, a warm city and Julivert likes its music accordingly. The title track of “A Tamarit” sounds like a big  party is about to break out and as soon as everyone is lubricated, maybe they will ask some Balkan, Cajun, and Roma musicians to join them. “Som de l’oest” hints they will lower the pace. Never fear! The moment fingers touch the fiddle, the temperature rises. If “Bella Ciao” got any more tongue in cheek, lead singer Jordi Suñé  would need a surgeon to dislodge it. Julivert specialize in cançons, high-spirited dances you’d find at a village feast or an Argentinian tavern. Call Julivert—the word means “parsley” by the way–the antithesis of the mannered offerings above. If the music sounds rough around the edges, I suspect they’d have it no other way.

 

 

 

Rob Weir

Old Joy: When Old Friends Fade

 

OLD JOY (2006)

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Washington Square Films, 76 minutes, not rated (brief dorsal nudity)

★ ½ 

 

 

 

 

Films in the Criterion Collection are usually quality offerings, but not always. I recently saw Old Joy, a Kelly Reichardt offering. She is known for independent movies that are conceptually intriguing. The final products, though, blow hot and cold. ( Meek’s Cutoff is my favorite from her.)

 

Old Joy came two years before Reichardt made her most celebrated movie, Wendy and Lucy. Lucy the dog is also in Old Joy and I exaggerate only slightly when I saw that the pooch has more affect than the two human principals. Mark (Daniel London) is on the eve of fatherhood, when he gets call from old friend Kurt (Will Oldham) wanting to know if he wants to go on a weekend camping and hot spring road trip. It is inferred, though never spelled out, that Kurt is troubled in a mildly depressed manner, but Mark could use a little time to wrap his own head around the change coming in his own life. His wife tells him to go, so he packs the car and takes Lucy along for the outing.

 

Old Joy was made in Oregon. Mark agrees to drive as everything about Kurt, including his rented apartment, his van, and his personal appearance bespeak the term bedraggled. They set up for the Cascades, smoke weed, and get lost a few times, but neither is what you’d call a great conversationalist. They end up spending the night in a tent at the end of a road where household junk has been strewn, find a diner the next morning, get directions, hike into Bagley Hot Springs, soak in the springs (with a bit of ambiguous neck rubbing from Kurt), head back to the city (Portland?), and say their goodbyes. That’s it. The movie is just 76 minutes long but its pace is so labored and lugubrious that it had to stretch to break the one-hour mark. There are several mostly wordless driving POV shots whose major purposes are to emphasize the lack of connection between Mark and Kurt and to spotlight a rather subdued soundtrack from Yo La Tengo.

 

I get what Reichardt wanted to do. Most of us probably have people from our past with whom we were once close. Reunions usually go one of two directions. In the best case scenario it’s like picking up a discussion that began decades earlier as if we were interrupted just yesterday. The sadder result is the realization that the two of you have gone down different paths and there’s no spur road that reconnects them. The title Old Joy says it all. Kurt reminded me of a burnt out Deadhead who thinks that the next hit, song, hot spring, or Burning Man–there’s an oblique reference to it–will resuscitate the sweet bird of youth. Reichardt uses postindustrial physical decay, tired diners, and litter to underscore how the friendship between Mark and Kurt is past its sell-by date. In the end, like Mark we observe that things are old, but not joyful.

 

Old Joy is ultimately a sad film, but it’s simply not a very interesting one. Despite the expanse of the mountain ranges and the lushness of the Pacific rainforest, the movie is claustrophobic. I’m at a loss to see why some critics called it one of the best films of 2006, or why it ended up in the Criterion Collection. Lucy was delightful, though.

 

Rob Weir

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