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Author | Cormac McCarthy |
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Audio read by | MacLeod Andrews Julia Whelan |
Language | English |
Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | October 25, 2022 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | |
Pages | 383 |
ISBN | 978-0-307-26899-0 |
Preceded by | The Road |
Followed by | Stella Maris |
The Passenger is a 2022 novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy. [1] It was released six weeks before its companion novel Stella Maris . The plot of both The Passenger and Stella Maris follows Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings whose father helped develop the atomic bomb.
The Passenger is McCarthy's first novel since The Road , sixteen years prior. [2] McCarthy had been writing The Passenger intermittently since 1980. It was generally well received by critics.
The novel follows Bobby Western, a salvage diver, across the Gulf of Mexico and the American South. [2] [1] Western is haunted by his father's contributions to the development of the atomic bomb, [2] and tormented by his inability to save his sister Alicia—the protagonist of the novel's proto-sequel, Stella Maris—from suicide, which happens a decade before The Passenger takes place. [3] Alicia was a mathematics prodigy who worked under the tutelage of Alexander Grothendieck (a real mathematician who shunned the field at the peak of his influence and chose to live in relative seclusion [4] ). The Western siblings grow up in east Tennessee as their father works at Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project (with luminary physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer). [5] Both children are math prodigies; Alicia studies at the University of Chicago while Bobby drops out of Caltech to pursue a career as a Formula 2 race car driver in Europe, though a serious crash puts him in a temporary coma and ends his driving career. [6] The events of the novel are punctuated with short, italicized chapters about Alicia's treatment for schizophrenia due to hallucinations of a deformed figure the narrator named "Thalidomide Kid" who perpetually teases and belittles her and summons his ghostly cohorts to perform unwanted and garish entertainment acts.
Following a salvage dive to recover any survivors from a submerged airplane, Bobby discovers that the pilot's flight bag and data box are missing. Within a few days, he returns to his apartment to find two agents of some kind who ask questions about the submerged airplane and the missing items, and Western learns there was also a missing tenth passenger.
Western spends time in bars and restaurants in New Orleans with old friends discussing truths philosophical and scientific. He visits his grandmother in Tennessee. Her house had been ransacked two years prior, and his father's research papers and all family records were taken. Now in hiding from the authorities on the advice of Kline (a private investigator), Western has his 1973 Maserati Bora seized and his bank account frozen by the I.R.S., ostensibly for failing to record in his taxes the money he inherited from his paternal grandmother. Left destitute, Western drifts across the country as a transient, eventually coming to reside in Formentera. At the end of the novel, Western lies in his bed in a windmill penning a letter to his sister, the love of his life. He has forgotten her face and believes he will see it again when he dies.
It was thought that McCarthy first began writing The Passenger in the 1970s, working on it intermittently over the following decades. [7] However, according to The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, he began drafting the novel in 1980. [8]
In 2009, notes relating to his next novel were found in the McCarthy archive at Texas State University. [2] McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal that same year that his next book would be "set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she's already committed suicide, and it's about how he deals with it. She's an interesting girl." [9]
In 2015, the novel The Passenger was officially announced at a multimedia event hosted in Santa Fe by the Lannan Foundation. The book was influenced by his time among scientists; it has been described by S.F.I. biologist David Krakauer as "full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel". [10]
Announced in March 2022, The Passenger was published by Knopf on October 25, 2022, [1] followed six weeks later by its companion novel, Stella Maris , published on December 6. [2] According to Publishers Weekly , the books had sold over 100,000 copies by the end of 2022. [11]
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Writing for The New York Times , critic John Jeremiah Sullivan noted that the Thalidomide Kid (who is referred to simply as "the Kid" in nearly all but the very first instance in the book, with just one subsequent reference later in the story) may be a reference to the protagonist of McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian , writing that he may represent a "zombified summoning of the earlier one, only in this incarnation he has witnessed the 20th century and been thoroughly damaged by it." [12]
Reviews of the novel were generally positive. Many writers have praised McCarthy's prose; Guardian critic Xan Brooks called it a "glorious sunset song of a novel... It's rich and it's strange, mercurial and melancholic." [13] Vox contributor Constance Grady argues that McCarthy's writing is "just as great here as you would expect...McCarthy's [sentences] are so good. They rattle out at you like little bullets, mean and punchy and precise." [14] Atlantic writer Graeme Wood says The Passenger is among the "richest and strongest work[s] of McCarthy's career." [3]
McCarthy has also been applauded for pushing his own artistic boundaries at such a late point in his literary career. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in the New York Times that "The Passenger is far from McCarthy's finest work, but that's because he has had the nerve to push himself into new places, at the age of all-but-90. He has tried something in these novels that he'd never done before." [5] Similarly, writing for Time magazine, Nicholas Mancusi notes that McCarthy's "first works of fiction to be published in 16 years begin in familiar territory but push his ambitions to the very boundaries of human understanding, where math and science are still just theory." [15] Nick Romeo also praised the novel in The Daily Beast, calling it "a powerful and thought-provoking distillation of many of the genres and ideas that have obsessed McCarthy throughout his career...The book's kaleidoscopic compression of sensibilities and subjects constitutes a new aesthetic in its own right.” [16]
On the contrary, many have noted the lack of a coherent and perceptible plot, one that doesn't answer many of the opening questions set forth in the mysterious plane crash portion of the novel; Grady calls it "deliberately frustrating" and notes that "You can almost feel McCarthy swaggering a bit as, with great skill and elegance, he chooses time and time again to frustrate any desire the reader might have for either narrative or story." [17] Mancusi adds that "the book is more interested in expanding the scope of its own mystery than in solving it." [15] USA Today books editor Barbara VanDenburgh notes that the book "can be at times frustratingly withholding and opaque...giving way to plotless philosophical discursions." [18]
The novel was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. [19]
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. His works often include graphic depictions of violence, and his writing style is characterised by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.
Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.
All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. It was a bestseller, winning both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".
Outer Dark is the second novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy, published in 1968. The time and setting are nebulous, but can be assumed to be somewhere in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. The novel tells of a woman named Rinthy who bears her brother's baby. The brother, Culla, leaves the nameless infant in the woods to die, but tells his sister that the newborn died of natural causes and had to be buried. Rinthy discovers this lie and sets out to find the baby for herself.
Child of God (1973) is the third novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the life of a violent outcast and serial killer in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee.
Cities of the Plain is the final volume of American novelist Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy", published in 1998. The title is a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Carleen Maley Hutchins was an American high school science teacher, violinmaker and researcher, best known for her creation, in the 1950s/60s, of a family of eight proportionally-sized violins now known as the violin octet and for a considerable body of research into the acoustics of violins. She was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and worked at her home in Montclair, New Jersey.
No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, who had originally written the story as a screenplay. The story occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country. Owing to the novel's origins as a screenplay, the novel has a simple writing style that differs from McCarthy's earlier novels. The book was adapted into a 2007 Coen brothers film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Charles McColl Portis was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968). Both Norwood and True Grit were adapted as films, released in 1970 and 1969, respectively. True Grit also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. The second film adaptation of True Grit was released in 2010.
All the Pretty Horses is a 2000 American Western film produced and directed by Billy Bob Thornton, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, and starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It premiered on December 25, 2000 to mostly negative reviews. It grossed $18 million worldwide on a $57 million budget.
Stella Maris may refer to:
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and nearly all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.
The Gardener's Son: A Screenplay is the print screenplay for the 1977 television film of the same name, written by Cormac McCarthy. The book was first published in September 1996 by Ecco Press. Based on an 1876 murder case in the mill town of Graniteville, South Carolina, the story follows Robert McEvoy—an embittered young man whose father works as a gardener for the mill-owning Gregg family—as a chain of events lead to his killing of James Gregg and an ensuing trial.
Jeff Nichols is an American filmmaker. His films are characterized by their Southern United States backdrop and ambience. He is also known for his longstanding collaboration with actor Michael Shannon, who has appeared in all of his feature films to date.
A list of works by or about Cormac McCarthy, the American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. McCarthy published twelve novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres, as well as multiple short-stories, screenplays, plays, and an essay.
"The Kekulé Problem" is a 2017 essay written by the American author Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). It was McCarthy's first published work of non-fiction. The science magazine Nautilus first ran the article online on April 20, 2017, then printed it as the cover story for an issue on the subject of consciousness. David Krakauer, an American evolutionary biologist who had known McCarthy for two decades, wrote a brief introduction. Don Kilpatrick III provided illustrations.
The Final Girl Support Group is a horror-themed mystery novel by American writer Grady Hendrix, published July 13, 2021 by Berkley Books. A television series adaptation has been announced.
Stella Maris is a 2022 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy that was published on December 6, 2022. It is a companion novel to The Passenger. It was the final novel published before his death on June 13, 2023. It consists primarily of dialogue with little narration, exploring the nature of the protagonist's delusions and topics such as quantum mechanics and phenomenology.
Frozen 2: Dangerous Secrets: The Story of Iduna and Agnarr is a young adult fantasy novel written by Mari Mancusi with illustrations by Grace Lee. Part of the Frozen franchise, the novel was published by Disney Press on November 3, 2020, and tells the story of Elsa and Anna's parents Queen Iduna and King Agnarr.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal of literary criticism dedicated to the study of the American author Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). The journal launched in 2001 as an annual publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society. Since 2015, issues are published on a biannual basis by the Penn State University Press.