Octogenarian Cormac McCarthy - considered one of America's finest writers - has an eclectic oeuvre that ranges from Westerns to post-apocalyptic themes. Since 2014, McCarthy has been a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute, where researchers study complex adaptive systems. McCarthy's interest in science enhances 'The Passenger', whose main characters like to chitchat about physics, math, and more. The novel is a character-driven story with a rather elusive plot.
*****
It's the 1980s and Bobby Western - who grew up in Ohio and Tennessee, went to Caltech, and was a Formula Two race car driver in Europe - is now a salvage diver in New Orleans.
Bobby is burdened by guilt because his beautiful brilliant sister committed suicide and his physicist father helped build the atom bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Western's life goes off the rails after he and his dive partner Oiler investigate a small plane sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
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The plane's manifest lists ten souls, but only nine corpses are found. Moreover, the craft's black box is missing. Bobby smells a rat and his personal (secret) investigation reveals that someone left the plane before it was submerged.
After the dive, government agents with obscure credentials start harassing Bobby.
They question him, search his apartment, threaten him, invalidate his passport, and eventually seize his assets for (supposed) tax evasion. In addition, Bobby's dive partner Oiler mysteriously dies during a dive job in Venezuela. All this leaves Bobby flat broke and fearing for his life.
The story follows Bobby as he works on an oil rig; lives in an isolated hut out west; takes measures to evade the government; and so on.
In flashbacks, we learn that Bobby found buried treasure in his deceased grandmother's basement, which he shared with his adolescent, schizophrenic, math-genius sister Alicia, who's intermittently institutionalized.
Sections about Alicia are interspersed through the novel, and we find that she hallucinated an entire entourage of people, the most prominent of whom was 'The Thalidomide Kid.' The Thalidomide Kid - who had flippers and a deep reservoir of malapropisms and silly jokes - had philosophical and mathematical discussions with Alicia, and tried to persuade her to stay in school and move forward with her life. However, young Alicia couldn't cope and killed herself. Bobby, who was in love with his sister, was consumed by grief for the rest of his life.
As Bobby goes about his business, he meets with friends, acquaintances, and other people in bars, restaurants, institutions, homes, and so on. Bobby's associates include a gorgeous transgender woman;
a conman;
a lawyer;
mental patients, and others.
Western and his companions discuss all manner of subjects, including quantum mechanics; abstruse mathematics; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy; expensive violins; race car driving; life and death and grief; and more.
The book is a vehicle for McCarthy to discuss topics that interest him, which are wide-ranging and sometimes esoteric. Moreover, the mystery of the sunken plane is never resolved. Thus I'd recommend the book to readers who like pedantic literary novels.
Author Cormac McCarthy
The book has a sequel, Stella Maris, which is about Alicia's sessions with her psychiatrist.
Rating: 4 stars
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