This is a difficult review because this book is a beautiful mess. Some of the writing is beautiful, but part of it is frustrating such as one particular conversation between two characters that felt like a writer having a rhetorical conversation with himself. Parts of this book left me asking big questions about what McCarthy was asking us and the nature of life and why we are here, which I think makes for great literature. Yet, there are also a lot of unanswered plot questions that are frustrating, but maybe that is the point. We are all here going through life and searching for meaning, but there is always something missing. Maybe the unanswered plot points are the point. I'm unsure. If definitely left me thinking after I finished it, which is a good thing, but it also left me frustrated, which may have been intentional on McCarthy's part. Hopefully, Stella Maris, which I haven't read yet, will help clarify things. ( )

There's a temptation to give this book much more credit than it deserves. I had hoped to get away with never reading the final work of a favorite though aged writer. I sensed that his closeness to the grave and the vast silence since his last publication would combine to create an atmosphere of exceptional yet unreachable expectation. The richness of prose that I love about BM or AtPH or even TR is not to be found here. There is such an overemphasis on dialogue, in fact, that it might as well be a script. Here, I don't even pick up on McCarthy's typical genius for providing a vivid sense of time, place, and character; most of the dialogue is generic, perfunctory, static. Indeed, some of the conversations seem to be recycled (e.g. Western's exchanges with Josie) and, again, the novel just feels like it is pedaling in place. The hallucinations become cartoonish, so even the most haunted character ceases to be compelling. McCarthy gives us Quentin and Caddie vibes, but Western and Alicia are flatter, less sympathetic. The numerous secondary characters float into the narrative with inconsequential brevity. And the fetishization of suicide that peeks out at us from the pages of The Road is on fuller display here; the deceased is treated by McCarthy as some oracular figure, a guru martyred by her demons. It's as if her suicide is meant to give her philosophical bona fides. It's just creepy. I realize this is one installment of a diptych, but Proust rendered us the kindness of volumes that stand up well individually. ( )

“Her hair was like gossamer. He wasnt sure what gossamer was. Her hair was like gossamer.”

I don’t know what this book is but it’s something. ( )

This book is very much Cormac McCarthy, but a very different McCarthy from many of his earlier works. In typical McCarthy fashion itis peopled with unusual and compelling characters and carries a plot that leaves the reader with as many questions as answers. Bobby Western is a physics dropout from Caltech who has been a race car driver (until a crash ended that career) and now is a professional diver. He is haunted by the ghosts of his parents who worked at Los Alamos, his father a physicist, and his sister, Alicia, a brilliant but schizophrenic math genius who took her own lift. Bobby and his partner Oiler make a dive on a downed plane to open the novel. They find nine passengers with no black box in a scene that Bobby believes to look staged. A short time later mysterious federal agents interview him and claim there were ten passengers on the plane and want to know about the missing passenger. This is the beginning of trouble for him. Bobby's life quickly unravels as his yearns for the sister who he was in love with and for friends who have passed away. The book does not have the typical McCarthy violence and action but is rather much more philosophical and reflective. I believe the title and the missing passenger on the plan to be very much an allegory for Bobby and his life. This is a very introspective book and should give the reader pause as it asks us to consider hard questions about our lives and whether or not we are the missing passenger in them. ( )

PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI, 1980 Bobby Western jumps from the Coast Guard tender into the dark at three in the morning after zipping up his wet suit jacket. Nine people are still fastened in their seats, with hair floating and eyes empty of speculation, when his dive light illuminates the sunken jet. The tenth passenger, the black box of the aircraft, and the pilot's flight bag are all missing from the crash site. Yet how? Western is haunted in body and spirit by men with badges, the ghost of his father, the man who created the atomic bomb that burned glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and his sister, who is both his soul's love and its ruin. Western is a collateral witness to plots that can only lead to his injury.

It is Alicia, his sister, who is the most interesting, yet curiously difficult to understand as she has conversations with hallucinatory images. The story explores a plethora of ideas , centered on the nature of mathematics and the limits of using words to describe the world. This leads one to wonder about the nature of literature itself and the reason we tell stories.

The Passenger is a magnificent narrative about morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the insanity that is human awareness that traverses the American South, from the boisterous bars of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Florida. It also instills in the reader a desire to read its companion volume, Stella Maris. ( )