Reviewing Cormac McCarthy
There are a lot of reasons to love The Passenger, and a few why you might not
A coworker told me about Cormac McCarthy back in the early 1990s — he had great taste in books, and I was quickly a fan. I loved McCarthy’s novels for the way that they got at some essence of the American west, the fierce bleak dry brutality of it. Also, the man can fucking write.
As someone who’d moved from the east coast to Los Angeles, totally clueless about the landscape or history or anything else, books were one of the ways that I tried to figure LA out. Also, a lot of driving and movie-watching. Movies that were supposed to be helpful, traditional Westerns, were totally useless to me — they seemed like a decades-long string of Reaganesque propaganda. I know film historians can tell me different, but back in the Bush era and I found a lot more truth about the West in McCarthy’s fiction than on screens.
But after The Road, which I devoured with the anticipation of any other avid reader, I kind of got off the train. The Road, after my first read, just seemed like McCarthy’s most desolate desert but transported into the future. I liked it, and was happy for him that it sold a shitton because of Oprah. But I’d read enough futurism and science fiction and post-apocalyptic novels that I wanted more.
And after my most recent read, I was really angry at The Road for its failure to see and include the natural world in its post-apocalyptic future. There’s not a single thing that’s not man that has survived (save for one dog barking, once). Not an ant, not a tree or a mushroom or moss, not a fish or a wolf or a bird, not ivy or crabgrass or a moth or a snake. But humans are alive and reproducing — it doesn’t make a lick of sense. (I read and wrote about it for the Tournament of Books Super Rooster in 2020). Now we have the recent novels by Lydia Millet and Margaret Atwood’s Maddam Trilogy, for starters, to show us different weird and messed-up futures that take into account the natural world. McCarthy’s seemed like a grand failure of imagination.
Which is a long way of saying that I was eager to read and review Mr. McCarthy’s new books — The Passenger, out Tuesday, and Stella Maris, out Dec. 6 — as soon as they were announced. I’d seen his misogyny. I’d called out his shortcomings. I was a true fan who’d come to see the limits of his talent, so I was perfectly positioned to bring clear eyes to his new work. Which I did for the LA Times.
And… The Passenger is soooooo good. It’s really really really good. It’s also got a fatal flaw, at least for me. But for the praise: It’s set in New Orleans, 1980 (mostly), a locale new to McCarthy’s fiction but that feels genuinely lived in. Maybe he did live there, I went down a bit of an archive rabbit hole beyond what the NYT’s article had, but eventually had to return to the book. It’s very mechanical, step by step, but it’s also philosophical/theoretical, trying to muddle through theoretical physics one conversation at a time. Which is not really what you got in his earlier work. The book is still full of McCarthy sentences that fall like mic drops. I don’t know when he actually wrote the book — Knopf isn’t telling, at least not me — but the man is 89. If he composed this just since publishing The Road, the last 15 or so years, let us kneel before his astounding talent.
The Passenger is about a salvage diver/racecar driver/physicist who is slumming about New Orleans trying not to get in trouble, but in the process he slides deeper into trouble. It’s a setup more than a plot, which spins backward and forward and in place.
He is pining for his dead younger sister, who he was as in love with. She was a brilliant mathematician with mental health issues who committed suicide, and was as in love with him as he was with her.
That’s the part that doesn’t work for me.
I found it really troubling. I couldn’t think of it riffing on something other that McCarthy’s own idea of what a tragic love story might be. (There’s brother-sister incest in his 1968 novel Outer Dark). It seems like a recent literary twist — it’s in John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire (1981) and Jeffery Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002). Both of those seem more emotionally complex than The Passenger, which makes the younger sister carry the responsibility and the consequences of their tragic love. This is even more apparent in Stella Maris, which consists of conversations between the sister and her psychiatrist in a mental institution before her suicide. Stella Maris is the name of the institution, not the sister, which at some level is an erasure of her as a character.
What I said in my review, and I am repeating here, is that is a failure of imagination that McCarthy can’t make a grown woman be the object of the main character’s affection. He has constructed this brilliant book (The Passenger, that is; Stella Maris is not as good) but there’s a rot at the center. I think it’s OK for readers to skip the book if they are creeped out by the love story. It is creepy.
When I was first working on the review, I was going to start with a fake McCarthy sentence because they are so easy to ape — elegiac tone, visceral observation, archaic vocabulary word, heartbreaking close. But I decided that it never really worked. I’ve read other reviews that complain about his prose, as if he didn’t coin his own style (and honestly, if you’re going to review the book, you have to talk about the science. Cut the personal health care issues). Anyway, other people can write sentences like Cormac McCarthy, but clearly they’re coming After Cormac McCarthy.
Anyway, that’s enough about McCarthy. If the brother-sister love story doesn’t bother you, don’t miss it.
Houses upstate
Not so long ago I was obsessed by Marc Chagall’s former art studio for sale in Marbletown, NY for just $240,000. It’s now pending sale, but I did go check it out. It’s a very rustic cabin with Old Man Hermit vibes. He had a small dining room table with a huge bible open on it, where he sat — yes, he was there — reading. Small, dark kitchen that was last updated at least 5 decades ago. A pet bird. Wood walls. Everything poorly-kept. But someone who had tended to it more would have pulled it further away from where it started, which was an art studio you could almost sense just under the surface.
I showed a house this weekend that’s also tiny, but with much much better vibes. It’s only 720 square feet — that’s the issue — but a bargain at $299,000 in Red Hook (the upstate Red Hook). Yes, it’s a small wood-paneled cabin, but the pictures in the listing don’t do it justice — it’s got a big flat back yard that stretches down to the flowing Roe Jan creek, with a garden fenced off, plus a garden shed, plus a 2 car garage with a cement floor with storage space that insulates the house from the road. And lots of flowering bushes and big huge tall trees, and wild space across the way. Oh, and a big deck.
That’s all for now, from New York’s best book-critic-slash-realtor.