Until recently, Cormac McCarthy‘s readers could be forgiven for suspecting that The Road, published in 2006, was to be the author’s final work. In many ways, the signs seemed clear: The Road eschewed McCarthy’s usual mining of the American past and present and reached beyond civilization itself, out to a harrowing, post-apocalyptic world. It also reached past a father’s ability to protect his child and, in its stunning finale, evocatively sent the next generation off to continue navigating the broken world of chaos and violence that, for so many years, McCarthy had relentlessly documented. The result was prophetic and quite possibly a perfect concluding statement for one of our most celebrated living authors.
But in recent years, rumors began to circulate that McCarthy had another novel in the works. It was purportedly entitled The Passenger, told from a woman’s perspective, and concerned with mathematics—a theme no doubt calcified by McCarthy’s longstanding association with the Santa Fe Institute. Yet beyond a lone YouTube video of an excerpt being read at the Institute, tangible evidence of the novel never surfaced. Maybe The Passenger was being saved as a posthumous publication. Or perhaps it was simply hearsay, a half-baked idea, and we’d never see it.
Well, surprise! The Passenger is being released today. Furthermore, a sibling book, Stella Maris—the book actually being read in that 2016 video, as it turns out—is slated for release on December 6. True to speculation, these books represent a staggering departure for their author and, together, comprise a breathtaking exploration of the nature of reality, love, God, consciousness, and knowledge. While their core concerns remain fully rooted in the overarching project of McCarthy’s oeuvre, The Passenger and Stella Maris tackle dazzlingly fresh ground and are a welcome advancement in McCarthy’s preoccupations.
In bifurcated fashion, The Passenger and Stella Maris tell the stories of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister joined by their genius for mathematics, their father’s hand in the invention of the atomic bomb, their struggle to connect with the world around them, and their doomed romantic love for each other. McCarthy’s daring has not dimmed since The Road, and The Passenger and Stella Maris pull no punches as they explore the craggiest regions of human consciousness through two of McCarthy’s most vividly drawn characters.
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The Passenger opens on Christmas Day, 1972 as a lone hunter, noticing a “bit of color in the scrupulous” darkness, finds the body of a young woman in a snowy Wisconsin forest, her eyes “frozen cold and hard as stones.” As the hunter stares at the corpse, McCarthy laments that, “the deep foundation of the world… has its being in the sorrow of her creatures.” Sorrow, in The Passenger and Stella Maris, is the likeliest underpinning of reality, and it is with this heavy proclamation that we set off.
With a turn of the page, we join the dead woman “in the winter of the last year of her life.” Alicia Western is an extremely bright doctoral candidate studying mathematics at the University of Chicago. She has $40,000 in cash stowed in her purse and is en route to committing herself—for the third time—to a Wisconsin mental hospital called Stella Maris, where she will be treated for paranoid schizophrenia. In a rented room, she writes a letter to her brother Bobby. Evidence of her fracturing mind is personified by the presence of the Thalidomide Kid, a pint-sized hallucination with flippers for hands who paces at the foot of her bed. He tries to engage her in conversation, and his word salad, without context, forms an eerie, indecipherable wash. “I dont forget much… I think I remember a young girl on tiptoes… What did she see? A figure at the gate? But that aint the question… The question is did it see her?” Though we don’t yet know what to make of what he says, it is clear his words are digging at her subconscious—and at her love for her brother, who we learn is in a coma.
This brief passage, denoted in italics, is the first in a sequence of quasi-dream-state conversations that comprises about a quarter of The Passenger, during which Alicia and the Kid are occasionally joined by an imaginary ragtag vaudeville group called “the hort,” which churns at the far side of her room, donning costumes and throwing impromptu minstrel shows. As these sections amass, the Kid’s words gain context and become more stinging: “You will never know what the world is made of,” he tells Alicia. “As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed.”
With the book’s uncanny tone established, we fast forward to 1980. At three in the morning, Bobby Western dives into the dark waters off the coast of Pass Christian, Mississippi. A salvage diver, he has been hired by the Coast Guard to investigate a sunken plane. He arrives at the fuselage just as his fellow diver, Oiler, finishes cutting off the door. Inside, the spectacle is simultaneously horrific and placid: the seven passengers remain in their seats, their “mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation… The copilot was still strapped into his seat but the pilot was hovering overhead against the ceiling with his arms and legs hanging down like an enormous marionette.” Mysteriously absent from the wreckage are the black box and flight case. At the surface, the men talk it over: “You cant even see the damn plane. And some fisherman is supposed to of found it?” There is no oil slick on the surface, and the lights would have shorted out when the plane hit the water. “I don’t have a story about how that plane got down there,” Oiler says. “And every time I think about all the things that are wrong the list gets longer.”
Misgivings aside, the job is done. Oiler leaves for a gig in Venezuela while Bobby returns to normal life in New Orleans. Affable as he is, Bobby keeps his distance from those around him. One evening, he dines with his friend John Sheddan—a counterfeiter who ironically proves to be the book’s sage—and a woman who is trying unsuccessfully to connect with Bobby. To her disappointment, Bobby ignores her advances and exits. “He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead…” Sheddan tells the woman, “They were just openly dating. And she was even smarter than he was. And just drop dead gorgeous.”
The day after the dive, Bobby is puzzled that the crash hasn’t made the news. He is visited by two government officials who add to the plane’s list of missing items an eighth passenger. They imply that Bobby has something to do with it. After all, how could a black box, a flight case, and a passenger disappear from a sealed plane?
Bobby takes it upon himself to explore the palmetto-covered islands near the wreck, searching for evidence of the missing passenger’s unlikely escape. He even finds a clue—a still-wet rubber raft “wedged under a fallen tree and then covered over with brush”—but, upon returning home, discovers his place has been ransacked (by “different guys,” Bobby suspects, suggesting there are now multiple parties hot on his tail). Soon after, he learns that his diving partner Oiler has died in Venezuela and was hastily buried at sea.
In a flashback, we learn Bobby’s grandmother relayed on her deathbed a message of gold hidden in her house. The house had since been demolished, but Bobby managed to unearth sealed lead pipes full of gold Saint-Gaudens coins from the remains of the cellar. He split the clandestine windfall with Alicia and, with his half of the money, moved to Europe, where his stint as a Formula race driver ended in a crash that put him temporarily into a coma. Now, in 1980, the quiet presence of surplus funds—and a Maserati Bora languishing in storage—isn’t a good look for a low-paid diver trying to convince the government of his honesty. A seizure of his assets commences, leaving Bobby with winnowing options as his status as a person of interest becomes a full-fledged struggle against fate itself.
Fate, it seems, has had a long history with the Western family. In one of the book’s most aching passages, McCarthy describes Bobby and Alicia’s father’s work with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb, evoking the aftermath of the bomb in Hiroshima: “Their eyes boiled from their sockets… It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash…” Since their father’s death, many of his papers have gone missing. When asked who might have taken them, Bobby says, “No idea. They didnt leave a note.” Another unattributed intervention; one can’t help but wonder if Bobby’s struggle might be part of an even larger picture.
In keeping with many previous McCarthy novels, The Passenger sets its protagonist hopelessly within a system whose very nature is unclear. Like the plane resting below the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico, reality itself is something indistinct and submerged. True understanding is impossible; we can only hope for a fleeting glimpse. On this level, much is familiar: McCarthy’s writing retains the tangible gristle of a field guide, full of the organic solidity and exacting diction that have helped solidify his reputation. Through Bobby’s attempts to evade the mysterious forces pursuing him, McCarthy demands that we, too, look to the invisible machinations that surround us. Perhaps we are not being chased by mysterious governmental forces, but are our lives not also shaped and cajoled in a myriad of ways we will never perceive? Do we serve ourselves well to ignore this? Conversely, are we able to free ourselves once we recognize it? In classic McCarthy fashion, both answers to this paradoxical choice are the same: no. Like Bobby, we realize we can’t ever really know, but we still must act.
Late in the novel, a decidedly unexpected visitor joins Bobby deep in the night at the beachside shack where he is hiding. The visitor tells Bobby that Alicia “knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.” The human project to understand reality cannot help being confounded—yet reality, personified by Bobby’s torment, persists. Throughout The Passenger, Bobby will travel across the country in an attempt to shake his pursuers. In the novel’s haunting, nocturne closing chapter, we find Bobby aging alone on the Mediterranean island of Formentera, a “lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.”
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In sharp contrast to The Passenger‘s whirling plot and breathtaking expanses, Stella Maris is a taut novel of ideas told via transcripts from the therapy sessions of Alicia’s final days. By now, Alicia has dismissed the Thalidomide Kid and the hort and now confronts the roiling mess of her psyche in Stella Maris under the guidance of Dr. Cohen, who tries unsuccessfully to draw out his patient’s vulnerability. Alicia is largely uncooperative: she alludes to a man she loves but withholds particulars, attempting instead to convince Dr. Cohen that reality’s inherent nebulousness is the actual problem; when Dr. Cohen suggests the Thalidomide Kid never existed, she retorts: “Define exist… I’m not really concerned with what other people believe. I dont consider them qualified to have an opinion.”
Alicia goes on to discuss mathematical theory at length, both defending and bemoaning the limits of our capacity for understanding: “We’re here on a need-to-know basis. There is no machinery in evolution for informing us of the existence of phenomena that do not affect our survival. What is here that we dont know about we dont know about.” Throughout their conversations, Alicia weaves long meditations upon the ideas and works of luminaries like Feynman, Von Neumann, Anaximander, Poincaré, Bishop Berkeley, and Gröthendieck. Though her words are wrought with suffering and sorrow, there remains something indelibly correct and necessary in what she is saying, and the veracity of her ideas—especially about the insufficiencies inherent in determinism—carries us to the beautiful closing gesture of the book.
Eventually, she tells Dr. Cohen that she wishes she’d had a child and traveled to Romania. She describes the respite she found when playing the valuable Amati violin she purchased with her share of her grandmother’s money. “Music,” she says, “is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up…. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.” Amid the books’ dark preoccupations, the pursuit of beauty is offered as a way to ward off despair.
Alicia also recalls stories of her father testing the bomb in New Mexico, how he “put his hands over his goggles against the initial flare of light and that when it came he could see the bones in his fingers with his eyes closed…. And then the reddish purple cloud rising in billows and flowering into the iconic white mushroom. Symbol of the age.” Dr. Cohen replies, “I’d have thought that the signature image of our age might better be the NASA photograph of the earth taken from space. That beautiful blue sphere turning in the void.” But Alicia is unmoved. “The void has no stake in the world’s continuing existence…. I think if there were anything to care it would have cared by now.” So far in her life, the only one who has ever really cared is Bobby.
We learn that Alicia once asked Bobby to “resign his brotherhood,” to “denounce this bond of blood”—a request as innocent as it is wrongheaded. “What do you want me to say?” she says to Dr. Cohen and to the reader alike. “That I’m a bad girl? Who is Westermarck to me or me to Westermarck? I wanted to do it with my brother. I always did. I still do.” In desperation, her desire ramps up to the flimsy, telling justification: “There are worse things in the world.”
Nearing the novel’s close, Alicia describes a chilling vision whereupon she, at 10 years old,
saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me… A being. A presence… The keepers at the gate saw me and they gestured among themselves and then all of that went dark and I never saw it again… I wish I could be who I was before but I never will be.
This moment has loomed large in her mind ever since, and we realize we have seen something like this before: in the opening pages of The Passenger, as the Kid cites this same vision. With this single drop of strong metaphysical concentrate, we are afforded a terrifyingly brief glimpse into the chaos and potentiality lurking beyond human perception.
According to Dr. Cohen, the Kid may be an instantiation of insanity that was “assigned” to Alicia to keep the true mental catastrophe, represented by the being at the gate, at bay. But assigned by whom? Reaching at the ragged edges of perception and reality, is there anything solid and discernible? Assuming we are equipped with mechanistic, “need-to-know” minds, what can we make of our demands to understand our suffering’s place in the greater context of reality itself?
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Read together, The Passenger and Stella Maris are a fascinating diptych, bringing light and depth to each other. The mysteries and coincidences are legion, and mirrored moments are plentiful (Alicia and Bobby, for example, are both, during random encounters, asked the definition of “gluon”). Yet, every time we near epiphany, McCarthy pans swiftly out from the driving concerns of the characters and plunging us into a sprawling, chaotic universe of which we can only make out the slightest sliver. We come to see that the characters, like us, are mere markers of the dismal progress humanity has made into deciphering the nature of reality. How can we? We can hardly make sense of our own lives. In a passage that is sure to become one of The Passenger’s most memorable, John Sheddan tells Bobby, “Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”
McCarthy has spent a lifetime attempting to disabuse us of our lassitude. But he is no moralizer: his violent and bleak vision leaves readers reeling in the throbbing void. In The Passenger, McCarthy writes, “The road to infinity may well unravel fresh rules as it goes.” Evil is alive and well, and deliverance is seldom. Yet, though his view is resolutely bleak, it is also filled with admiration for our capacity to endure and act bravely. He makes us see how goodness forever wages its territorial dispute with darkness over the human heart.
McCarthy’s work has long appealed to readers on a visceral and symbolic level, and it is breathtaking to see him now directly engage with pure theory and with a lineage of great thinkers. But he also shows us that such pursuits, in the end, are failed attempts to formalize, distill, and thus understand what is forever ineffable and primal. In Stella Maris, Alicia observes that “Darwin’s question remains unanswered. How do we come by mental abilities that have no history? How is it that the brain seems to prepare for what’s coming?” Even the scientific method, the apparent antidote to subjectivity and superstition, cannot quite explain itself and, taken to its logical conclusion, suggests a cloaked intentionality. The problem is only relocated—we deny reality when we attempt to fully grasp it.
Throughout The Passenger, numerous conversations grapple with the same question: “Do you believe in God?” In fact, Oprah Winfrey posed this very question to McCarthy during a 2007 interview. His reply: “It would depend upon what day you asked me.” Despite his ruthless appraisal of our chances at clarity on this front, McCarthy’s writing pursues a sublime and majestic undercurrent weaving through the dark waves of chaos. There is genuine honor and hope to be found within our simultaneous resistance against and acceptance of the darkness. And so, McCarthy’s reckoning with theory is joined by intentional forays into the metaphysical, forging a discordant, necessary partnership set in the story of two doomed lovers. The results are staggering.
