I am a great admirer of Cormac McCarthy’s work. No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty and The Road are intensely terse and darkly compelling. Blood Meridian is absolutely mind-blowing and one of the few books I’ve (tried to) read multiple times. To be honest, McCarthy is a great inspiration for my own writing.
And so I was pleasantly surprised to learn of McCarthy’s The Passenger, a book published in 2022, a year before his death. “A brilliant book,” reads the review from The Los Angeles Times. “An elegiac meditation on guilt,” writes Esquire. “The first novel that I’ve read in years that I want to read three more times to savor,” proclaims The New York Times.
Sadly, none of its true, as the book is awful. Weighed down by relentlessly repetitious, cliched dialogue, completely undeveloped vapid characters and heavy-handed explications on random topics such as the Viet Nam War, quantum mechanics and the Kennedys, it’s a 437-page spew that could have been a novella at best.
I’ve encountered no greater mystery in life than myself. In a just society I’d be warehoused somewhere. But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry. He finds himself co-opted. Difficult these days to be a rake or a bounder. A deviant? A pervert? Surely you’re joking. (159) I could go on. Or to be more accurate, Mr. McCarthy could go on and he does.
The book felt debilitating for me in the end, making me wonder if I knew good words and that, leaving me to wonder how McCarthy could write this sophomoric gobbledygook, how the maladroit dross wasn’t purged and how the press could offer such sickly sweet sycophantic praise.
Certainly, we all have our bad days, but this book made me recall the line from McCarthy’s own The Road: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever. And so not just the cannibalism but now this book too.
