The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy, author; MacLoed Andrews, Julia Whelan, narrators
Bobby Western and his sister Alicia/Alice had an illicit love for each other which condemned them both to live a life of misery. Mental illness complicated Alice’s life early on, and also complicated Bobby’s, though much later on. She was the smarter of the two, regarding math and numbers, but he was the more stable. Neither fulfilled their intellectual promise because of circumstances they created, that may or may not have been beyond their control. However, they made choices that altered the trajectory of their lives.
The Passenger is about Bobby and, of course, it includes memories and anecdotes about his sister, Alicia. I read Stella Maris first. It was probably a mistake, since it colored and complicated my comprehension of “The Passenger”. I advise readers to read “The Passenger” first, as was intended by the author. Stella Maris is about Alicia and her inability to live in the real world. She is so bright, but she understands she has an affliction that she is unable to control, nor does she seem to want to control it. She disregards her medications because she dreads their side effects. Without them, she has visions/hallucinations, which are very real to her. She is brighter than her doctors, so bright that the world disappoints her. She doesn’t desire life. She is in love with her brother.
Bobby is older than she is, and he is wiser in his own way. Her mental challenges pain him. At first, he makes decisions based on common sense and proper decorum. After he leaves school and stops studying physics, he finds a pot of gold, courtesy of his grandmother. He shares it with his sister, who was only 16. She buys a valuable violin. Bobby, who was only in his early 20’s, and Alicia had both given up their studies. Their attempt to further their education disappointed them. The educators could not satisfy their needs. Bobby becomes a race car driver, and then he becomes a deep-sea diver for a recovery company. Alicia falters and eventually goes to Stella Maris, presumably to escape from her reality and to get help.
Meanwhile, after a dive to search a submerged plane, Bobby and his partner discover something is missing from the plane and so is a passenger. That, and his father’s past, seems to haunt him, and although he seems to have no idea why, it puts him on the FBI’s list for investigation. Then he suddenly is investigated by the IRS, as well, since his lifestyle doesn’t comport with his income. He is forced to make decisions he may regret. He seemingly has no idea why these events have put him in this nefarious spotlight, but he has to escape. Both Bobby and Alicia eventually find themselves in situations in which they have no control and which greatly and negatively impact their lives. They are always running away. Their grief and loneliness haunt them without resolution.
Bobby rejected his incestuous feelings for his sister while she embraced hers. She wanted them to live together. He refused and carried a torch his entire life for his forbidden love. At one point in Bobby’s life, after Alicia is no longer present, he has a vision. He has his own hallucination of one of her “imaginary” friends that she has told him about. The kid, a result of the fertility drug thalidomide, comes to visit him too. Did the “imaginary” guests help them both to deal with their shame about their affection for each other, their guilt about their father’s work to develop the bomb, their shared dissatisfaction with the way their lives turned out. Could there have been another healthier outcome?
Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. His sentence structure is easy to follow, but his narrative demands that the reader think and not read mindlessly. There are so many philosophical questions raised that demand answers, and I don't pretend to have the answers, or to have understood every concept presented, or to have known every name raised in this book, but I enjoyed reading it as it made me really contemplate my own life and aspirations, my own decisions and their outcomes. Still, the time line moved back and forth and the characters also bounced back and forth, which made it a little harder to follow. I felt like Bobby and Alicia, who were trapped by the system, the one within their own minds and the one within the outside world with all of its bureaucracy and rules.
Have you ever been in that position? Have I ever been in that position? Yes, at times. I think we are all forced to make choices based on the world in which we live, even if it hurts us, and the company Amazon, has trapped me in a hopeless situation, regarding book reviews, without any recourse. However, that is a tale for another time. We are all in danger from the power of the government’s bureaucracy and the power of the bureaucracy of private and public companies, in our private and public lives. The book’s message to me is that we had all better start to pay more attention to our lives and our place in the world around us.
This book is so creative; it will excite every reader’s imagination. One reviewer, James Wood of the New Yorker, likened the characters to passengers traveling on life’s journey, which is pertinent to the very title of the book. It seemed to me to be a very astute observation. ( )

Gorgeously disjointed or disjointedly gorgeous, take your pick. The hero, the strong wounded hero Hemingway invented, lost his innocence (or rather, had it sucked out of him) when his sister, with whom he had been in love with and she with him, exits his life in by an early, sudden death.

The book is nihilistic ("...all of history a rehearsal for its own extinction," "In the end there will be nothing that can't be simulated"). Maybe half a star off for that. But, remember, this is only four-fifths of a novel. The coda, Stella Maris, the dead sister's tale, may deliver the redemption this book so exquisitely cries out for. ( )

This book is really hard for me to review. There were things I absolutely loved about it, and other things I really didn't. Sometimes I just wonder if I'm actually smart enough to read McCarthy.

The book is about a salvage diver, Bobby Western, and his relationship with his mentally ill, but brilliant sister. The plot line is a Kafkaesque tale of some entity trying to track down Bobby, but I was never quite sure why he was being stalked or who was doing the stalking. Maybe that's on me, but I'm looking forward to discussing this aspect with other readers.

So, from my limited perspective, I thought the character development was very interesting, but the actual plot, not terribly so.

I love how these characters are revealed to us over the course of the novel. We learn slowly about their backstory, and the reader needs to work to fill in the blanks. One aspect of McCarthy's style that I really like is that he never underestimates the intellect of his readers. He makes you work for it, and I feel I could re-read all his books and get more out of them than I do on an initial reading.

The other aspect of this book that really makes me hover close to the 5 star mark is his use of descriptive language. It's just unparalleled. I don't like books that spend tons of time on description, but when it is so well done, I'm there for it. He also delves into some complicated topics on this one (physics anyone?), and I don't mind that in short bursts, but I fear some readers might mind it a lot. Because it's not like he's dumbing it down for you so you actually grasp it. If a first time novelist did this, I'd think it was pretentious, but in this particular novel, it worked.

Finally, this book has some insights on death that I found to be very compelling. There's a lot of philosophy in here, and for me, those are McCarthy's best moments. He states things that I think to myself, but in such a succinct, interesting way. These gems are what keep me going when he's talking about physics.

For now, I'm marking this as 4 stars, but there are absolutely 5 star components. This is my third book by this author, and I definitely would like to read his work start to finish. I feel like after a discussion, I may be able to give that 5th star, but my grasp on the plot wasn't quite where it needed to be . . . ( )

The Passenger is a very deftly written book, but also a very strange one. Although the plot and characters easily held my interest throughout, this novel is also filled with deeper meanings lurking behind its sly symbolism. This is serious literary fiction, not simply an intriguing mystery story. On a single reading, I remain puzzled as to who the missing tenth passenger from the sunken business jet might have been. I likewise am uncertain who the shadow figures who seached Western’s lodgings and otherwise complicated his life were. That they were some sort of government operatives seemed likely, but why were they so interested in a college dropout turned salvage diver, even if his father had been a physicist working on nuclear weapons? Given that Western’s younger sister’s schizophrenia, complete with hallucinated figures staging perplexing vaudeville acts for her under the direction of the presumably equally hallucinated “Thalidomide Kid”, and given that at one point, the Kid appears to Western as well, I speculate the government agents Western believes are watching him may themselves be merely a delusion on his part. As for his bank account being attached by the IRS – well, that could easily simply have been the IRS finally catching entirely by themselves to the fact that he had inherited a substantial amount from his grandmother on which he had never paid any taxes.
The book had many quirks. It was filled with interesting new vocabulary, often very specialized terms from fields as diverse as automobile racing and quantum physics. But I also noticed a pronounced tendency to run two words together, and to omit apostrophes from contractions, thus “sockfeet”, “don’t”, “isnt” and so forth. I am not certain what the significance of this might be. For me, it imparts a strange dreamlike sense to the world about which I am reading, which perhaps goes along with the possibility that many of the things that protagonist Bobby Western believes he is experiencing may in fact be partly or largely delusional. But perhaps I am overthinking the idea that Western may have schizophrenia. Certainly the book also depicts characters pondering the unknowable nature of reality, of truth, and similar big topics, which philosophers classically cannot leave alone.

I should not be writing this review. Why? Either I've become too old to appreciate the work of a great author or that same great author (a favorite of mine) has written a work at which I can't help but fling invectives. Could be either or both I suppose.

Cormac McCarthy has been one of my favorite authors and his literary skills are without question. Indeed he makes makes ample display of his "to be envied" style in "The Passenger".

Had I some degree of humility (not to mention good sense) I would stop here. As likely you should as well. On the other hand (like McCarthy himself), I'm at an age where both good sense and sensitivity to criticism are on the wane.

I'll give you the flavor of my reaction to "The Passenger" by sharing the three words that came most frequently to mind as I read. Self-indulgent, pretentious, and shallow.

Self-indulgent in the sense that it feels as though McCarthy is saying to himself "because I can write something I should". Much of the work while well-written, seem pointless. Not crucial to the plot, the characters, or life in general. "Look what I can write."

Pretentious in the sense that the author often seems to go into events, theories, and cultural styles (in length & detail) for no reason other than to let the reader know (via his characters) that he is savvy and worldly wise. At times the characters themselves appear bored and indifferent to the meanderings.

Shallow in the sense that the entire book seems to be posturing without substance. The reader frequently asks themselves " Where is this going and what is this all about." It's not so much puzzling as pointless.

This book is not post-modern. Haruki Murakami is post-modern. Laszlo Krasznahorkai is post-modern. If the book was meant to be post-modern, it didn't succeed.

I am aware that I haven't damaged either McCarthy's reputation or reader's appreciation of this work. My strong reaction is likely based on my feelings of disappointment. I bought a new hardbound copy of the work at full retail price (a thing I never do) solely on my respect for McCarthy. I sat back expecting to slowly relish the crowning achievement of one of my favorite authors. My disappointment slowly morphed into anger.

To put myself in a more realistic state of mind I recalled a scene from the very old TV series MASH. Radar O'Reilly (a simple enlisted man) berates Hawkeye Pierce (a surgeon in a Korean War combat area hospital) for performing surgery whilst either intoxicated or at a minimum hungover. Radar doesn't fail to let Hawkeye know how disappointed he is in one of the people he esteemed. Hawkeye's response is both cutting and accurate. Hawkeye doesn't do surgeries for Radar, Radar's expectations do not dictate his behaviors, and Radar needs to focus on himself and not others. I will mull over that scene.

This review has gone on way too long. And, I can't use the excuse of being "in my cups". Sadly, stone cold sober. Just old and crabby. ( )