Cormac McCarthy’s Quest for Answers Amid the Chaos

My grandmother was younger than I am now when Cormac McCarthy published his first novel. In the time since, he’s solidified his reputation as one of the last living heirs to the Southern Gothic tradition of American literature, a foster son to Faulkner, O’Connor, Dickey, and others. With last week’s release of McCarthy’s first book in over 15 years, one of the living literary giants has made this much clear: If in the five decades since his debut you think you know Cormac McCarthy, you’d be dead wrong.

Much like many of McCarthy’s novels, The Passenger begins enigmatically. But unlike many of McCarthy’s novels, it begins with an overtly religious (though ironic) scene. A beautiful young woman, dead at her own hands, hangs from a tree on a snowy Christmas night. The man who finds her body regards her like a statue in a church. He pauses in reverence before kneeling for a moment in prayer. The life and significance of this improbable saint is just one of many mysteries that imbue the pages ahead.

The narrative alternates between the lives of two siblings. The main storyline follows Robert Western, a salvage diver in New Orleans. Extended flashbacks follow the last days of the girl found dead, Western’s sister Alicia. Their parents met while working on the Manhattan Project and died prematurely as a result of that hazardous work. Both brother and sister are also, in their own strange ways, far-flung victims of the atomic bomb. Western wanders through life listlessly, haunted by his family’s contribution to such destruction; Alicia’s tale chronicles her prolonged, bizarre conversations with the voices in her head, a menagerie of vaudevillian freaks. She inherited her family’s intelligence and, she believes, the nuclear-induced genetic abnormalities that caused her schizophrenia. McCarthy seems to suggest that the destruction caused by atomic weapons may have begun at Hiroshima, but it didn’t end there.

Lacking his sister’s genius, Western has long since abandoned his own study of physics. He spends his time idling through life, working odd jobs, living off an implausible inheritance, and brooding over life’s deepest questions. He’s a modern Hamlet in Dixieland. Like his Danish counterpart, he’s both indecisive and inordinately fixated on a female family member. His affection for Alicia is frequently described as incestuous, though his feelings are something entertained from afar. She remains for him a kind of muse. Not unlike the children in

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