Tag Archives: The Road

Is Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” The Worst Novel Ever?

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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.

The jacket design offers promise.

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.

State of mind just halfway through the book.

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.

Terrorized by Dreams

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In an attempt to confront our demons, we are compelled to drum up the worst we can imagine, images that terrorizes us in our dreams, and reproduce those in film for all to see. hqdefaultI am haunted by images of a man hurled into a pit of alligators, a woman’s head floating in a jar and a basement where evil lurks. gacy1011Seeing these things doesn’t do us any good; it isn’t a relief to the images out, but instead raises the stakes, inspiring more horror to behold. the-road-blu-ray-3-jpgAs Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Road: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.

Sensationalism: the whittling of a word

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Warning: This blog is entirely derived from sensationalism

Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers (Wikipedia), such as a horrific event from this week in which a man was pushed onto the tracks and killed by a New York subway train. This image of the man’s final moments has led many to ask why no one helped and instead took pictures of his death. This type of imagery dominates the media and has indeed infected my memory. (Or as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: The things you put in your head are there forever.) I remember well the 1979 murder of ABC journalist Bill Stewart in Nicaragua, played over and over on network television, and obsessed over another image taken in 1988 of a German bank robber threatening to kill his hostage. (He didn’t.)In the end, I used this as source material for my first novel The Sacred Whore, a sensational story in itself about prostitutes who kidnap a basketball team so that they can broadcast their views on what’s wrong with America.

Sensational (also a horse, album and hip hop artist) is defined as causing great public interest and excitement, as in “Sensational Superstar Vickie looks sensational!”

The 3D tools for Sensational Superstar Vickie

Sensation (also a song, event, film and type of BDSM play) is a style of writing, similar to verisimilitude, which aims to imitate the sensations of experiencing an event.

Christopher Walken experiencing too many sensations in film, “Brainstorm”.

Sensa is Latin for ‘thought’ or ‘teachings” as well as being a weight-loss program.

Rodin’s “The Thinker”

Sens is a commune in Burgundy, in north-central France.

Cathedral in Sens, France

Sen is the name of the protagonist in Miyazaki’s magical  Spirited Away.

Sen (Chihiro) in “Spirited Away”.

Se is the internet country code for Sweden and also represents the element Selenium.  And S is a letter, a series of Tesla cars, the stock identifier for Sprint Nextel and the sound a balloon makes when it’s run out of air.