If McCarthy’s latest duology must be summarized with a single word, that word is dull.

Disappointing could work, too, though it lacks the emphasis on what six hundred pages of disoriented exploits amount to when considered in retrospect. At the time of reading, The Passenger is, in fact, anything but dull. Many scenes in the book stand out—nearly all of them, in fact—as exciting, or at the very least, gripping. As to be perhaps expected of such an established writer, McCarthy knows how to make a conversation about transvestite’s life and times as interesting as a weekend on an empty oil rig during a bad gale. Which is to say: the reader constantly wants to know where this book is going.

It seems counter-intuitive, then, to suggest that a book full of riveting episodes and abstract conversations should be summarized as dull. And yet, one reaches the end—the real end, not just of The Passenger but of Stella Maris also—and finds that what he’s just read means nothing. It is a collection of episodes held together by the thread of a man’s life story, and its companion piece a reflection of the life story of his sister. Interspersed throughout the former (and consuming most of the latter) are lengthy dialogues concerning theoretical physics, the Manhattan project, psychology, and opinions about what certain mathematicians believed about real numbers and the question of how to measure reality.

Some casual reviewers have remarked that these passages make for difficult reading. Patience, however, is more than enough to get through them, at least for those who are totally unaware of the contributions to physics that scientists such as Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, et. al., are credited with. A basic understanding of the field and a general awareness of these personalities is more than enough to suffice, so long as you’re willing to be taken for a ride by a writer who is, himself, also neither a physicist nor a mathematician. In other words, despite what some may have said, one doesn’t need to have a thorough understanding of quantum fields in order to read The Passenger and more or less understand what’s being said. Neither does one need have read Dedekind nor Poincare in order to get Stella Maris.

One exception here applies, though again, one need not have actually read his work with any thoroughness to understand its inclusion: Gödel. This will be treated with some detail further below.

What, then, could make the work so dull? This is the most frustrating part of The Passenger: the reader is constantly trying to determine where it is going, and even upon reaching the end, he doesn’t seem to find out. A moderately attentive reader has difficulty answering the simple question of what the book is even about. So what is it about?

The life of a man, certainly, or more broadly, the life of two siblings caught up with each other in a strange relationship that is papered over with intellectual distractions. More broadly, one could argue that it’s about where experience of life meets explanations for its existence, but that’s the dullest part: there’s nothing of interest explicitly being said there. Instead, the main characters, Bobby and Alicia Western, tortured by the experiences of their lives, spiral into fields wholly unequipped to answer this question. One commits suicide, despite knowing what this would do to her brother, and the other lives out a life without purpose while hounded by alleged conspirators whom he never sees.

This is a simple reading, of course. Perforated throughout the narrative are Bobby’s episodes of life, first around New Orleans, then Knoxville, then for a little while out in Montana, until eventually returning to New Orleans and terminating out in Europe. El Paso and Juarez both make an appearance. Before he had been a salvage diver, his sister committed suicide. When she died, he had been in a coma. Before he was in a coma, he made a career racing Formula Two Maseratis in Ibiza, after coming into a remarkable amount of money left to him tax-free by his paternal grandmother. Before she died, his father died in Mexico from cancer, and before that, his father had been largely estranged as he worked on theoretical physics models while Bobby was in school. While Bobby was in school, his sister was conversing regularly with mathematics professors about the measure of reality. And before that, his father worked alongside Oppenheimer to develop the first nuclear bomb. He even visited Hiroshima soon after the nuclear hellfire he helped design scorched and melted the city off the face of the planet.

The book makes an attempt to cover the length and breadth of McCarthy’s interests. It covers a lot of ground, in terms of ideas, and for the most part, through the use of frequent and extended conversations between characters. Its general format is not totally alien to McCarthy’s mostly-established presentation, despite the sheer length of some of these dialogues, but its content does come across as quite the deviation. Familiar patterns nonetheless arise.

The Passenger in Context

Long time readers of McCarthy’s work will find more than passing similarities or references to his previous work throughout The Passenger. The obvious clues are those regarding locations and settings, although these are also the easiest to dismiss. Locations like Knoxville and El Paso are entrenched settings in his books, but also ones he spent considerable time at over the course of his life. So too is Ibiza, which until now, had not featured in any of his novels. Likewise is the case with New Orleans. Some writers will insist that one should write about what he knows, and while this is obviously true, there’s also a mild autobiographical element that slips into the narrative when this happens. In the case of Suttree and, to some extent, The Passenger, there is little doubt that this is intentional.

The pattern is greater than the association of locations, however. It includes the contents of particular plots—No Country for Old Men’s crime conspiracy thriller, for instance, hangs over the opening segment of Bobby Western’s story: the grisly aftermath of an event in which everyone involved was killed, only where Llewelyn Moss took something from the scene, Bobby Western finds that something has already been taken, and the means by which this was done seems impossible. While this plot is, of course, one of the most attention grabbing elements of The Passenger, Bobby—and McCarthy—make an explicit decision to avoid anything to do with it ever after. The event and the mystery are immediately dispensed with, but the conspiracy, or something like it, remains.

Other elements of his previous works also take roles of central importance. In Outer Dark, the most obvious component of The Passenger’s metacontext becomes clear. McCarthy’s second novel is about a brother and sister who are involved with each other in an incestuous affair, and whose child is left for dead before being picked up by a traveling tinkerer. The brother sets out in search of employment, and the sister sets off in search of their missing child, after it becomes clear that the child has been taken rather than killed. The short novel covers the brother’s continual flight from various false accusations and his pursuit by a threatening trio of ogre-like phantoms who seem to kill everyone he crosses paths with. The sister, meanwhile, only finds the remains of their child after the book’s grotesque climax.

One might suggest that this sort of southern gothic extreme is in line with McCarthy’s ‘shtick’; it’s just his thing to work with in his novels, so incestuous affairs between brother and sister would only naturally show up more than once in his oeuvre. Except that it’s not his shtick. McCarthy doesn’t really have one, although stories filled to the brim with American violence could arguably considered a ‘shtick’. One might pause to consider what makes American violence different from, say, European violence or Asian violence, but those are asides for other pieces. It is obvious when one engages with his work that there’s a distinctly American character to the violence he depicts. And incest isn’t really part of it.

Suttree follows the semi-autobiographical account of an impoverished man living out his days on a houseboat along the Tennessee river, interacting with the local population and committing himself to the cold—or hot—elements of Appalachian life. He sits at the edge of civilization and yet is no foreigner to it, and his story is positioned between madness, delirium brought on by illness, and the frank, crass, periodically grotesque humor of American sensibility.

Most famously, Blood Meridian pits a band of villainous American rogue soldiers against the stark frontier populated by invading Mexicans and barbaric Indian tribes, interspersed with frontiersmen and early pioneering settlers en route to California. Of central importance is the now famous otherworldly Judge who claims to measure precisely the circumference of all that exists: some sort of megalomaniacal personage of death or chaos that defies any effort for the reader to gain knowledge of him.

In his Border Trilogy, the frontier has moved: now the great wild expanses of the northern Mexican desert has become the landscape upon which most of the stories take place. Each book contains multiple border crossings. This idea is continued with No Country For Old Men. And then, of course, is The Road, in which the whole world is the frontier.

Elements of each work find placement in The Passenger’s story. We read a conspiracy thriller whose direction ends up going totally differently than it did in No Country. We read a story about star-crossed lover-siblings who, unlike his second novel, don’t seem to have consummated their desire (although, arguments for either case are compelling). We read a story about a loner man on the edge of society with a complicated family life. We read of visitors from beyond who demand excessively to understand the framework of the world. And throughout all of them, we read of borders.

Here McCarthy’s major works reveal their common theme: the intention to go beyond what is known, and the attempt to depict human experience in realms that exist past what is common. The Passenger seems to be McCarthy’s effort to explain what prompts this drive in the first place, even as it continues the pattern. Only this time, the frontier past the limits of borders is not some physical place that one can point to on a map. It has its referents, of course: Los Alamos Laboratory, Bikini Atoll, the sequestered lecture halls of UC Berkeley. But what he’s looking for is beyond the scope of the world. His characters, and indeed himself as well, are dissatisfied with the inability of the world to account for itself.

Placed in different terms, this is effectively what McCarthy’s interest in ‘witness’ comes down to. Something bears witness to us in order for anything to be considered real. But when we are alone, who bears witness to us? And even when we are together, can anyone truly be said to be bearing witness to one another? We can see one another, hear each other’s words, or read them, and perhaps even think we might know one another a little bit. But who or what could bear witness to our interior lives—our thoughts, our particular experiences, our internal mono- and dialogues, our dreams, memory imprints, our nostalgia? If these are purely of our own witness alone, then they couldn’t be real because they’d exist essentially in a vacuum. And yet they don’t, because we don’t.

And history unfolds, events occur, and reality continues forth. Reality must be defined by some witness, and intuitively—as there is no reason in going into any great depth on this point here—this witness must be perfect, or at the very least, lacking in the fallible trappings of human self-interest, if we are to assume that reality has any weight at all. Who then is this witness? What is it?

There’s a very simple answer to this question, but of course, it’s impossible to come to when one is preoccupied with other questions that have even simpler answers. And McCarthy brings up what seems to be the most crucial of these simpler questions, himself.

McCarthy’s ‘Kekulé’ Problem

In some sense, the whole work, and in particular, Stella Maris, is something of a metonym or unintentional allegory of what plagues its own characters: a terminal error of putting the cart before the horse. Alicia’s obsession with mathematics as an incomplete effort to explain reality and her experience of it, on the one hand, and Bobby’s fatigue with physics’ inability to do the same. Both problems stem from the reluctant embrace of an ambiguous world spirit or world will, or alternatively, the conceptualization of the divine as something that is necessarily ambivalent. It is most fitting then that McCarthy chose their ethnicity to be Jewish.

Would that it were only that this plagued the characters rather than the entire work itself, however. Alicia’s dialogues—monologues, functionally—throughout the latter half of Stella Maris touch on McCarthy’s so-called ‘Kekulé Problem’. He sums this up in a short exposition that he submitted to Nautilus back in 2017: “since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand [Kekulé’s] problem in the first place, why doesn’t it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like ‘Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.’” The Kekulé in question being the scientist whose eureka moment involved accurately formulating the configuration of the benzene molecule from the image of the ouroboros that appeared to him in a dream.

Much of his essay is featured nearly verbatim within the text of Stella Maris sprung from the lips of Alicia Western. This indicates an intimacy with the character that extends beyond the use of her as a fundamental asset in the story’s narrative. She’s a literary device that serves, at least when it comes to his thoughts on this ‘ Kekulé Problem’, as his author’s mouthpiece. This is what he really believes. He isn’t simply presenting a character’s thoughts on a particular subject in order for the reader to gain greater insight into that character—and by extension, a multi-faceted investigation into a given question. There are no multiple faces here. There’s only Alicia’s.

Unfortunately, this seems to extend more broadly to Alicia as a whole with respect to Stella Maris, save for the parts that are most obviously relevant to the narrative of its paired volume. When she speaks on matters of mathematics, physics, the universe, life within it, mental illness and paired experiences of it: we can assume that these aren’t simply the ramblings of a suicidal genius in a mental ward; they are probably what McCarthy himself believes. It is almost certainly with a great deal of self-reflection, some guarding irony, and perhaps even bitterness, that he decided to use a beautiful young girl who commits suicide to be his avatar. And one professing—confessing?—herself to mental professionals in an institution, at that.

This author-avatar issue is only relevant because of how these beliefs tie into the whole work. Again, we have to consider what the work is actually about: frontiers, the beyond, insufficiency of pure reason. It’s about all of the questions that are really being asked when one shouts into the apparent void, “why is there something rather than nothing?” Some of these questions are physical: what is some thing in the first place? Some are epistemological: how can I know there’s something? Some metaphysical: what does ‘is’, as in, ‘why is there something?” mean? Or reversely metaphysical: how can I, who is a thing, even have a conception of nothing? Others psychological: how do I experience something and why is this the case? And, of course, there’s always the moral dimension: why do I care so much? What does it matter? What difference does any of it make?

McCarthy’s ‘Kekulé’ problem is one means by which these questions begin to rear up. But so also is the abstract belief in a ‘world will’, or a will of things that seems to exist beyond human reason. He, and others like him who believe more or less similarly, are frequently at pains to avoid conflating this with any notion of God. God is beyond the world, after all, and any attribution of this ‘world will’ to God’s, under their framework, is always paired with attributing to Him a total apathy for mankind. It’s the simple conclusion after a series of assumptions: the world seems cold and cruel, it also seems ordered toward certain ends, order can’t happen by accident (there must be some other will involved), ergo who or whatever put us here must not like us. Or, alternatively, it must simply have interests of which we are not involved in the slightest. The world, in other words, couldn’t care less about us—which, at least in the right context, is a correct assumption.

Of course, the attribution of a ‘world will’ is flatly nonsensical. ‘The world’, in this sense of the term, is the label we attribute to the sum total collection of observable things. It’s a collection of objects, for the most part, with the interaction of free agents—ourselves—thrown in for good measure. Some might try to insist that there are other free, intelligent agents out there as well, which would affect the movement of history: aliens, machine elves, fae, etc. And on this they’d at least be partly right. McCarthy includes this in The Passenger as well. But whether or not such agents exist and affect history has no bearing on whether the world ‘itself’ somehow has a will of its own. If you recognize this, then much of the mystery presented by McCarthy in The Passenger collapses under the weight of its own delusions.

It is not a tragedy to claim that the world cares nothing for man. It is a tragedy to claim this while believing that the world had a will of its own and that it could care, but for some reason, it doesn’t. It is a greater tragedy still to attribute this apathy to God, Whose very actions in the world very plainly indicate an exact opposite set of facts. But these are claims that would belong to the realm of faith, one might rebut. The Faith, perhaps, but it is not any more a matter of faith to argue in favor of the reasonableness of most basic dogmas of Christianity than it is to argue the same for the most basic tenants of mathematics. That said, one might not even be aware of this if all one has studied of metaphysics is the mainline academic philosophy of the last two centuries.

To return to his question of language and the unconscious, we approach then what is exactly this problem. McCarthy ponders on how the human larynx and throat could have evolved such as to support language, a feature of human experience that cannot be accounted for by natural selection. Speech serves little in guaranteeing survival from one generation to the next. And that’s to say nothing about how language could even develop in the first place—a question no biologist has an answer for. And yet it just appears out of seemingly nowhere. All of a sudden, people could talk, and not only that, they could understand each other. But McCarthy also wonders, why doesn’t man’s unconscious play ball?

The framing of the question is wrong. Which seems more likely? That the throat and larynx evolved within the space of about a thousand years—maybe ten—to accommodate the increasingly diverse sounds necessary for language to flourish? Or that human beings, rather, were designed to accommodate language instead? The former isn’t likely at all, given that the suggestion a language-capable throat could be naturally selected in any time frame, much less one as short as that, is totally contrary to Darwinian theory. It doesn’t take a practicing religious person to point out how the idea doesn’t make any sense.

This sums up the tedium of The Passenger. Most of the questions it asks have answers. It’s just that the answers they have are totally unacceptable—indeed, unknowable—according to the parameters by which they are being asked.

Aesthetical Incompleteness

It takes McCarthy the better part of five hundred pages to reach what is probably the crux of The Passenger, at least in terms of its math heaviness: Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Using Alicia again, he doesn’t actually lay out the theorem itself, as there’s little need to, but instead references it at length and holds it up as the most important work of mathematics from the last century. On this point, he’s probably right. Unlike the casual and flippant references to most—though not all—of the other mathematical principles and figures in the work, the incompleteness theorem is key to the entire story. In fact, anyone with a passing familiarity with it will immediately have the unsettling feeling that The Passenger is simply one long meditation on incompleteness transcribed into a vivid if meandering work of literature.

Gödel’s theorem is as such: there is no system of natural numbers that can prove, within itself, that those numbers are true. Secondarily, this system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. In other words, there is no system capable of defining itself. It’s not hard to extrapolate, then, that there is always, by necessity, a superior system required to define inferior systems. This is somewhat intuitive, but when its implications are ruminated over, it becomes clear that there has to be, at some point, some maximally superior system that forms the foundation of all systems; otherwise, you encounter an infinite regress which undermines it all.

Well, fortunately, there is. But this isn’t the place for that. What’s hardest to allude to is that the maximal ‘system’ is also the simplest one. The greater you go, the simpler it gets, but the harder it is to understand it. This is when your boots have dipped into the marshlands of metaphysics. But McCarthy doesn’t dwell much on metaphysics, at least in any obvious and explicit sense. At most, he references some Greeks. Good on him, given the short range of centuries he’s plucked nearly all of his explicit influences from.

Incompleteness is something that either haunts or defines the work. It’s hard to tell which it is, but ‘haunts’ seems the better word here. Here must be addressed a different sense of incompleteness, one that is beyond that of the purely rational: aesthetic. Stories have appropriate ends. This one doesn’t.

“I got here the same way the coin did.” One might recall the words of Anton Chigur of No Country for Old Men. A rather vindictive passenger, if one could call him that, but his words here at the end of that story—especially the film—mark exactly the ethos of what passengership is: I’m along for the ride, buddy. I got here just like you did. Just like this circle of metal did. His actions are as significant as the passage of a coin through the air. He has surrendered responsibility of his agency over to some other force. What is that force? McCarthy doesn’t know. Neither do I, but I have a fair idea. And it’s probably not good. But McCarthy knows that, at least; Chigur is a bad guy, after all. So is the Judge.

And yet, one can read Bobby’s story, and then Alicia’s logs, and come to the end of The Passenger/Stella Maris duology, and find that there’s no obvious way that one thing led to another. It all just sort of happens. This is alluded to periodically by Bobby’s unwillingness to act, but that’s not enough to explain the eclectic content nor the intentional sputtering out of what the plot was set up to be. It’s not as simple as a coping suggestion that this book was never about the plane crash at the beginning. It obviously isn’t, now. But at some point, it clearly was. A lot of text is spent on that subject. A story is set up. And that turned into something else. And whatever that turned into was mixed with the story about the atomic bomb. And somewhere along the line, the thing about the passengers came into focus. The horts. The Thalidomide Kid. To put bluntly, the book is a mess. McCarthy never finished what he was trying to get at.

Those who have created things know this feeling well. There’s always another line that could be carved into the wooden sculpture. An extra surface that can be sanded down just a little more. For novelists, the book isn’t completed when the last sentence is written. It’s when the last round of editing is complete. And the last round of editing is never complete. There comes a point in the creative process when one has to acknowledge that they have to finally say it’s done. This is especially true of books that take years to write. It is very easy to keep a writing project bound up in creative revisions indefinitely, because these are projects one never truly tires of. Gets disgusted with, certainly, but tired of? Bored of? That’s not the stuff of which writers are made.

Nonetheless, there is a lot to be said for pulling the trigger too early. In the case of The Passenger, there had been rumors that McCarthy had been working on this—or something resembling it—since the early eighties. And as mentioned above, one finds in it elements of all other major titles of his, including his early material. But what the rest of his work has are conclusions. Even in the wandering narratives of Suttree and The Crossing, McCarthy supplies both an ending and a straight line to it that ties the work together in a more or less satisfying package. This ending is not always a reasonable one, perhaps, in the sense that the narrative is totally resolved and whatever strings that are left are tied up into a neat little bow. But at the very least there’s a general aesthetical conclusion. The tale is told: draw curtain. The Judge dances and plays and brags. Suttree moves (or, perhaps, dies). Billy encounters a dog. To quote the preeminent creative artist of our time: “It’s like poetry. It rhymes. Hopefully it’ll work.” Usually, it does.

The same can’t be said for The Passenger/Stella Maris. He supplies endings, certainly. In a rather obvious sense, the narrative is mildly circular, with the very first scene taking place after the end of Stella Maris, which neatly fits between it and the beginning of the first chapter. “It’s a bloody ring.” The last chapter and scenes of The Passenger would be satisfying were the rest of the work more ordered toward its intention. If, of course, it could have sorted out what its intention actually was. Even there, it is incomplete.

One might appropriately ask who exactly a book reviewer thinks he is to demand more order out of a novel, much less one by an established great such as McCarthy. Fair enough. To that it can only be answered: someone who has read his other novels. The Crossing is as much an apparently disorganized journey narrative with lots of different, sprawling elements to it as The Passenger, but it’s held together with a common aesthetic, has a more defined story buried in it, and McCarthy keeps its scope humble even when dialogues concerning the existence of meaning end up peppered throughout the narrative. The Passenger is more interested in these dialogues than whatever the story is actually about, which seems to give the impression that it’s a story about the math or about the science, even though it’s a story about these siblings and the weight of an apparent contradiction with the world that they aren’t able to solve. And ‘apparent’ is doing a lot of work here, as that contradiction is not really a contradiction at all.

This is reiterated several times to Bobby, who eventually comes to admit it, himself. He is paralyzed by indecision. He was positioned by his birth and his intellect to continue in the same field as his father, to follow academics in the growing field of theoretical physics, and probably even to contribute materially to fields like nuclear engineering. He admitted his passion for these. And yet, he ran from all of it. And he continued to run. The last words of the book are his own admission of paralysis that he carries with him into death: the end of a life comprised of long and crippling waiting with questions that have no answers because the very questions are posited incorrectly. The obviousness of this error is what makes the book so aesthetically incomplete. It’s what makes it dull.

Conclusion

By the end of The Passenger, the reader’s knowledge of Bobby Western is less than even incomplete. He remains a stranger to us: another passenger on the bus, if one was willing to be glib about it. And yet he is the protagonist of the book. The whole book is about him, but his interest in physics, his Formula 2 preoccupation, his diving and odd jobs, his friends, even his sister, are all glimpsed with the abruptness of shortened, disconnected chaos. A sprawling narrative is one that is supposed to remain cohesive. Every part of it comes together because of some common element, even if one part isn’t obviously related to another. The Passenger isn’t cohesive, unless one considers the common element holding it all together to be the notion of incompleteness itself. But we wouldn’t stoop so low as to seriously suggest such a thing. Not from a writer like Cormac McCarthy.

The book is strikingly unfinished. Not incomplete. Unfinished. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been in the oven. It doesn’t matter if he’s been working on it since the late seventies. It’s a book he clearly hasn’t finished. Any sense of completeness is one we have to project upon it ourselves, and that is not the mark of a genius who has entwined ‘incompleteness’ into the thematic content and structure of the work. The book isn’t finished because the answers he’s looking for, and perhaps even tried to arrive at, are ones that are obviously unsatisfactory even to him.

This is his novel. He has creative control. What he is dealing with in his novel is something he still has not sorted out, yet. That means the novel isn’t finished. And yet, here it is: here in two slick hardbound editions available to us by Knopf, complete with a little cardboard box that encloses the two depicting a mushroom cloud. And it’s still dull.

Make no mistake. There is much that can and should be said about this novel. Although this review criticizes it for being dull, unfinished, and with somewhat laughable of a worldview behind it, it’s impossible to suggest that McCarthy has lost his touch. This review hasn’t touched on the fact that the transvestite is something of a mirror for Bobby in very specific and obvious ways: a friendly inversion, so to speak, and therefore a key to understanding Bobby in relation to the plot. It hasn’t touched on the Thalidomide Kid, a favorite topic of reviewers, all of whom seem baffled by what he’s supposed to represent—and, for what it’s worth, it seems very clear that he is not some mere hallucination, contrary to what so many seem to believe. It hasn’t touched on the theories circulating that Bobby never came back from Europe when he was racing cars, and that the whole book is simply a death-dream or some sort of purgative afterlife—which, if we’re being frank, are very stupid theories. It hasn’t touched, really, on what McCarthy is talking about when it comes to mental states, the distinctions—if there are any—between madness and sanity, and what Alicia’s problem actually is (it’s not schizophrenia). Nor has it touched on Bobby’s cat.

The Road introduced McCarthy to a massive audience that seemed to think they understood his work. Maybe they did. Maybe, even, they do, and I’m the one out of line, here. But The Passenger is far more clever a book than most seem to be giving it credit for—particularly those who liked it. Nonetheless, it isn’t finished, and it won’t be finished until the author comes around on certain fundamental questions about reality that this book offers no deeper insights to.

If you’re a fan of McCarthy’s writing already, this might be worth reading despite the criticisms laid out here. If you’ve never read any of his work, this is not the book to start with. And if you aren’t a fan already, this won’t make you one.

As a brief, unrelated aside, it is prudent to complain about a modern feature in premium quality hardcover releases: deckled edges. There is no reason for these to exist in the modern publishing industry, especially when they are hollow indicators of ‘premium quality’ despite looking like garbage and making the book harder to flip through. Publishers who do this, such as Knopf, apparently, should be ashamed of themselves.

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