The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

While STELLA MARIS, its sister book, is a focused encounter with the limit of human intelligence, THE PASSENGER is a study of fragmented existence in what comes after, of lives in an unfathomable world. Alice Western, the center of STELLA MARIS, appears here in flashbacks as a young teen encountering her grotesque hallucinated vaudeville, led by The Thalidomide Kid. Her brother, Bobby, meanwhile, is living with her death. He survived a catastrophic race car crash and works as a salvage diver, cobbling together a tenuous existence in 1980s-era New Orleans populated by a loose confederation of misfits and outcasts. It is a grubby world streaked with the uncanny and sinister—plane crashes and missing bodies, federal agents and JFK conspiracy theories—but the mysteries never resolve; they mutate. That Bobby’s father helped build the atom bomb, and that Bobby and Alice loved each other too much are the two facts of his life. He goes down, again and again, into murky depths, looking to recover something, looking for Alice. But what’s there cannot be recovered. The scenes in this book are so intensely cinematic and potent that I feel like they put actual cinema to shame—I am not sure mere images could be as vivid or expansive as what McCarthy creates here and in the space between these two books. Reading this was like handling a snake, an encounter with incredible, unsettling, absolute aliveness. I couldn’t put it down. (Sidebar: I would like to read a brilliant essay on the ways the atomic bomb has percolated back up into cultural consciousness now … these books, but also WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD (another book I loved), “Asteroid City,” and “Oppenheimer.”)