The Passenger book review: Life, the Universe, and Everything

[@cdane7]

I watched this review last year when I first started reading CM. I saved TP/SM for last and have been sitting on them for awhile, sad that I wouldn’t have any more new McCarthy after this. Because of your enthusiasm for the book I told myself I’d come back here and leave a comment after I read the book and here I am. I didn’t know how I would take The Passenger after reading a lot of reviews because they were so mixed. For example I know the guy that does the Reading McCarthy podcast doesn’t seem to think that highly of the book, as well as other hardcore CM fans online who just didn’t like the book as much as the classics. Well, consider yourself not alone because I whole heartedly feel that it’s the greatest book he ever wrote. It took the place of Blood Meridian at the top for me. My top 3 are 1) The Passenger 2) Blood Meridian 3) The Road. For me, these are his masterpieces. Now, I don’t believe The Passenger is as great as Blood Meridian as far as just the writing in and of itself from start to finish. BM has this ceaseless almost otherworldly/Biblical brick heavy poetic language/prose that’s just in a class all by itself. It’s like he must have suffered brutally to compose each and every sentence to perfection. If there is a finer written novel out there I haven’t found it yet. The Passenger is not that and doesn’t attempt to be that. Although that’s not to say the writing is not great because it has some of the best lines and whole passages of his lifetime. It’s highly highlightable. But then it also has all the goofy parts with the Kid that are just purposely head scratching so it’s clear McCarthy wasn’t trying to replicate the serious writing of Blood Meridian and his other top-shelf writing when it comes to these parts of the book. So if we are strictly talking about the writing itself, then Blood Meridian is still his best book. The Passenger rises above it for another reason, and that to me is because it goes vastly deeper into what it means to be a human being existing in an unknowable universe with all of our love, loss, hope, hopelessness, fear, guilt, regret, shame, illusions and everything else. It has to my mind more heart and more ambition than anything he ever wrote. While reading I kept thinking it’s almost like McCarthy was writing the book he would write if he’d never written anything else and this was the one and only book he would ever get to write. I think he put his whole self into the book. I think it is autobiographical as far as his thoughts, feelings, concerns, disappointments…written over many years. I think it’s telling that for me his other piece of work outside The Road that had the deepest effect on me heart-wise is Whales And Men and the end of Cities Of The Plain. I can tell that W&M and the end of Cities was drawn from the same well as The Passenger. You know, I really love all of Cormac’s work, but I love the stuff that’s the most brutal on the heart the most. Outside of Blood Meridian which as I said is just a stunning piece of literary art. But The Passenger takes the cake for the stuff that’s hits in the heart. I feel that’s it’s the most beautiful novel he ever wrote. And the great thing is it is endlessly re-readable. He has given us so much to ponder. For me, it is an outright masterpiece and the greatest work of his career. I think it’s amazing he published this at 89, apparently finally calling it finished, and I would kill to know the real back-story about its creation. When did this thing really begin? Which parts were written long ago and which parts were written not long ago? Maybe one day a biography will be written and we’ll find out. At any rate, you’re not alone with your love of The Passenger. I think it might just be my favorite book of all time. Dead serious. Cheers!

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Oh, I'm so glad someone else loved The Passenger as much as me! :D You're so right; it may not surpass Blood Meridian as regards the writing, (but then again The Passenger is like 70% dialogue, so it probably wasn't ever going to), but it's just so...much. He really did go all out with it, and I think it's probably the most human and emotional thing he ever put to paper. It's really like just a sweeping encapsulation of the human experience in a universe whose nature we may never know. And it really is a gift that keeps on giving. I've been itching to give it a reread myself and see what all I might get out of it on another go around. I think a lot of the Kid's dialogue might make more sense coming back to it. I noticed that in the first italicized section of The Passenger with Alicia the Kid makes oblique reference to the event that Alicia speaks of in Stella Maris where she saw the Archatron, but I didn't pick up on that when I initially read it. The cool thing is that the Kid speaks in a mishmash of gibberish with little kernels of what might be lucidity intermixed. I think these books were McCarthy making one last effort at grappling with the notions of God and existence, and for me they surpass anything else on the market today. :)

[@cdane7]

Yes, I think maybe The Passenger was Cormac’s The Brothers Karamazov.

[@clayton7463]

Great review! Loved it as well and thinking of doing a reread soon.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Thank you! :)

[@lunchhooks2253]

What a fabulous laser beam of a review! I'm about half-way through savoring the book and your review is, I believe, smack on McCarthy's intent, the ne plus ultra. Also like the social commentary.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Thank you! :) A year on now and this is still my favorite of his works. He really went for it with this book; didn't hold anything back. And yeah, his social critiques are pretty deftly done; you can kinda read right over it and not notice really what he's saying, but if you're attuned to it, it's pretty incisive. ;)

[@lunchhooks2253]

@@TH3F4LC0Nx I was reading it this afternoon and thought some would think it a fool's gibberish. But you are so correct in saying it's high-order philosophy. I believe it akin to the Tao of Physics; one attempting to answer answerable and unanswerable questions and knowing the intersection thereof. I've read The Road and Blood Meridian and now The Passenger. It's exciting finding a new author. Subscribed.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

@@lunchhooks2253 Thanks! :D Yeah, I really do think with The Passenger we see the confluence of physics and metaphysics. He was really into science there towards the end, and I think he was using that to really wrestle with life in a more hands-on way than just abstractly pondering.

[@t0dd000]

I think you nailed the meaning of the title.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Thanks! :D

[@MikeWiest]

I came to these new books only about a month after I discovered Blood Meridian-and was blown away by it. I don’t know if McCarthy’s other books follow the Blood Meridian pattern, but because of Blood Meridian I came to The Passenger and Stella Maris on high alert for cleverly hidden clues to DEVASTATING REALIZATIONS to come. I was ready to interpret characters partly as allegories. I was also looking for a momentous climax of some kind in the book’s last few pages, like in Blood Meridian. Right now I judge the new books POSITIVELY: they tried something original and ambitious and arguably succeeded. But I can see a rational reader taking a NEGATIVE PERSPECTIVE, which might be summarized something like this: “McCarthy is just vomiting up his pet philosophical musings through the mouth of a genius character in his story; the genius character is not realistic; the love story is not compelling.” I’ll mention one other specific concrete flaw in the books below, but now let me turn to my positive interpretation of the story. The story can be said to be “about” multiple things, but let me start with the suggestion that The Passenger is about schizophrenia, or more broadly: ways we try to attribute meaning to the events of our lives. We are reminded in the text that there is a genetic component to schizophrenia. The sister is diagnosed with some kind of (atypical) schizophrenia. Meanwhile the brother discusses various paranoid theories with people he knows. To quote Nirvana, “just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” When The Kid comes to visit the brother, I saw that as a dramatic confirmation that the brother has a milder case of whatever the sister has. No magical (or quantum physical) explanations are required, since he has heard her describe The Kid in detail. Two possible, hypothetical routes to some kind of salvation for the brother or sister appear in the story. One is their LOVE. In other works of literature, love is often presented as the purpose or meaning of life; and we are told that love conquers all. The brother and sister represent a deep and pure tragic love like that between Romeo and Juliet. The other potential path to salvation in the books is MATH, PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY-some kind of intellectual or transcendental insight or mode of being that might “make it all worthwhile.” As I read I was looking for some way the two (love and math-physics) could be married to create some kind of consummation of their love, or redemption and peace, or something. So now the story is not just about schizophrenia, and I would say it’s not really about math, or the atomic bomb, or the Kennedy assassination either. It’s about whether there is a way to interpret life that is not…nihilistic or absurd or tragic. At least for these characters. We start with the puzzle of the missing passenger in the submerged plane. We realize that is not where we are going to get answers. These characters are also past looking for ultimate answers from organized religion. So we (they) are left with love, or modern physics and math. Over the course of the story we are presented with various dreams and hallucinations that might be clues to some transcendental reality in which the lovers are able to fulfill Alicia Western’s impossible dream of having a child with her brother. We have Miss Vivian, the older woman obsessed with the screaming of babies-could she be some kind of future-past Alicia? We have the possibility that the pair did have sex but lied about it or repressed the memory. Maybe there was even an abortion, and the Kid is an image of that and mechanism for “not thinking about that.” We have some characteristically McCarthian passages describing dark creatures emerging from strange primordial demonic soups. Most dramatically to me, we have the moment where the Kid brings a trunk and inside the trunk is a doll and the trunk is labeled Property of Western Union but the Kid reads it as “PROGENY OF WESTERN UNION.” Given that the siblings are named Western, “Progeny of Western Union” was like a slap in the face. On the next page Alicia is crying and saying she’s sorry to the doll. I thought that had to be a baby. The only thing that didn’t fit is that she said “I was only six years old.” What could that mean, I thought. Maybe the answer is in the unread letter in The Passenger. Nope. (Spoiler answer: she was six years old; the doll was just a doll. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”) I was also carefully noting the allusions to physics and math. The main way I could see modern physics contributing to actualizing their love would be through the phenomenon of ENTANGLEMENT, whereby distant parts of a quantum system can be in instantaneous interaction no matter how far apart. Interestingly, this central concept in quantum physics was not really discussed explicitly but only hinted at for example when Alicia says she’d like to discuss BELL’S THEOREM in Stella Maris. In Stella Maris we also get references to the possibility of loops in time, and the possibility that “simulation” will be the real “afterlife.” Will the final pages reveal that they had sex and a baby? Or that their love created a quantum baby “made purely of light” that needed to be protected in some platonic realm? Or that Bobby’s life was just a simulation his brain created in a coma? Or that they are their own parents and that somehow that’s why Bobby or Alicia or maybe their mom is the missing passenger in the plane? (That last one isn’t even coherent, I don’t think.) No. We get a bit more about sex-talk and dreams between them, but no consummation nor any baby. I don’t think we get any far-out modern physics interpretation such as Philip K Dick might have written. No, the “boring” interpretation of the story works just fine: they had a forbidden love, they were miserable, and they died lonely and apart. They were preoccupied with things that could never solve the real problem: we’re all dead in the end. None of the potential “reveals” I could imagine as a reader would really solve the existential problem the characters face. But if the book did end with a reveal like that, that would give us as readers a sort of satisfaction that the characters can’t access-and neither can we in real life. So if there is an articulable point to the story, it might be a sort of warning to us newfangled atheistic types who get intoxicated by the apparent profundities of math and physics-that although they might appear to give us alternatives to traditional religion for making sense of the world, and making it appear benign or intelligent (as in the line in Stella Maris where she says the issue is whether the universe might be intelligent)-we might trick ourselves into thinking science offers an alternative optimistic worldview-but no. This book is a smack in the face to wake us out of our smug scientist-minded worldview. So ultimately, we pass THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS LIKE ALICE AND LEWIS CARROLL, BUT END UP BACK IN THIS BLEAK WORLD WITH SCHOPENHAUER. In Schopenhauer’s view the universe does have a mind, but it’s not conscious except in us and other animals. The mind of the universe is a blind will to exist that leads to different parts of the universe eating each other not realizing they are eating themselves. So everything lives according to urges we don’t understand, suffers more or less, and disappears with no lasting trace. Aside from the many funny parts in The Passenger (perhaps unexpected in such a dark story), the faint happy notes in the story result from human connections, such as the holding of hands at the end of Stella Maris. One other point I have not seen mentioned by others is THE RED SASH that Alicia’s body is wearing at the start of The Passenger. In Stella Maris she says she wants to be completely erased from existence and not found, but in the Passenger we are told explicitly that she wore a red sash “so that she’d be found.” So maybe she had developed her relationship with Dr. Cohen enough that she wanted to reestablish a connection with the rest of humanity-if only after her death. In summary: the worst spoiler for this story is: there are no spoilers. What appear to be spoilers are decoys. There are no spoilers because there are no satisfying answers that can be revealed, to the problems faced by the characters-or us. Final note regarding an apparent flaw: the author uses “dubious” multiple times when he appears to mean “doubtful.” This is not so minor because the characters are supposed to be hyper-intelligent and hyper-educated, and they make a habit of correcting others’ pronunciation and grammar. So it broke the spell for me (to some extent) when it turned out they don’t know the difference between DUBIOUS and DOUBTFUL.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Wow, what a breakdown! 😅 You definitely went deep into it, for sure. I think I would disagree though about Alicia (and possibly Bobby) being schizophrenic. While she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, I think it's sort of implied that that isn't truly the case. The patient in the mental hospital that Bobby talks with towards the end of the book mentions that Alicia doesn't conform to what typical schizophrenics are like. Also, the treatments she undergoes to get rid of the apparitions don't work, and in Stella Maris I took it that the whole Archatron thing was meant to imply that her hallucinations were sent by some higher power. Other books of McCarthy's (namely Blood Meridian) have included at least potentially supernatural elements, and I took it like The Passenger was him finally committing fully to that. I do agree with you though about the book being sort of a rebuttal to placing one's faith wholly in scientism. Because things only ever seem to lead to more questions, not answers. So I think you're right about the book not really being spoilable, because it constantly sort of fakes you out by not going in the direction you're thinking it will go. Thanks for watching! 😊

[@MikeWiest]

@@TH3F4LC0Nx Thank you reading and responding! I totally agree with what you said about her condition not being schizophrenia so that's why I slipped in the weasel word "atypical" and later said Bobby has a milder case of "whatever she had." ("I'll have what she's having." 🙂)

[@MikeWiest]

ps I'm curious whether you have a thought about the meaning of the red sash she is wearing at the start of the Passenger, that appears to contradict her desire to not be found....

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

@@MikeWiest You know, that really escaped my notice until you brought it up. I dunno; maybe she had a change of heart? 🤷‍♂ Or maybe it ties back into the "things have to be witnessed" theme that McCarthy has toyed with for decades. 🤔

[@ricardodabreau1660]

Well done sir well done

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Thank you! :)

[@PrisonMike-_-]

I also feel like he outdid himself. I really appreciate your review of this novel. You see through the language to find the narrative, which is what The Kid instructs us to do in the beginning of the novel

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Thnx for watching! :)

[@NerdishlyActive]

What a phenomenal review! I definitely plan to pick this book up. Are you a teacher? Wouldn’t be surprised because you’re sharp and very well spoken.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Oh, thank you for the compliment! :D But no, I'm not a teacher; I'm actually an accountant, lol. To paraphrase Chekhov, "Accounting is my wife; literature is my mistress." XD

[@NerdishlyActive]

@@TH3F4LC0Nx Ha! I like that lol.

[@BrandonsBookshelf]

I am so split! I have not read the book yet, but this is the most positive review of this book I have heard yet. But there's others who I trust their opinion like I do yours, who simply hated it....guess I'm gonna have to read it myself. Amazing work on this one!

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

It's probably not for everyone, but I do think it's objectively more ambitious in its scope than anything he's ever written, and I personally found the characters very compelling. Hope you like it! :)

[@PrisonMike-_-]

Yeah don’t listen to others’ opinions. Most of the critics give off self righteous attitudes. The Passenger, if you’re willing to put in the work, is an absolute treasure and will be high in the rankings in years to come

[@ItsTooLatetoApologize]

Great video! It has percolated some divergent thoughts for me. So, thank you for that. I have not finished reading it yet. Life has been so busy, but I can’t wait to finish it and see if like you it can supplant Blood Meridian.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Oh, I hope it hits as hard for you as it did for me! It was so moving that it simultaneously made me feel like crying and yet robbed me of the energy to do so. When I closed the book I just kinda sat there for several minutes, stupefied, wondering what this mystery of life is all about. XD

[@ItsTooLatetoApologize]

@@TH3F4LC0Nx that’s awesome! I’m so glad this novel did that for you. 👏

[@barbarajohnson1442]

1/2 way thru! I have to say I think Blood Meridian, to me, was better, but I'm not finished. There is , dare I say, cinema, quality to it that I didn't feel in the Road or Meridian. Loved your comment on the set up character dialog used just to showcase his Santa Fe Institute mathematical gleanings, or other philosophy. The description of diving, tugboat operations, all magnificent, reminding me of Melville. I will carry on and report back. Thank you for your musings!!!

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Thnx for watching! Hope you end up liking it! :)

[@shinglepicker]

Great analysis thanks for the content!

[@corylarsen5788]

What do you think of the film: "Sunset Limited"?

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Haven't seen it, but would really like to! I like both Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. :)

[@corylarsen5788]

It's been a favorite of mine since I first saw it

[@AJ_Dunn]

I really want to read this book as well. It will likely be awhile to get to it, but you make me want to grab it now. 😅 It's definitely going on my book list.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Def do! It's sooooooo good! :D

[@t0dd000]

SPOILERS . . I see "the bait" as setting more than plot. And I have my theories about how real some of those folks chasing Bobby really are. I.e., maybe he is more like his sister than we think.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Oh wow! I didn't consider that angle, that maybe Bobby has some mental disorder himself. Interesting, very interesting. However, the g-men do interact with the bartender lady as well, so I'm unsure how that might work. But still, even more food for thought! :D

[@t0dd000]

@@TH3F4LC0Nx There's three sets of dudes investigating him: the tax folks, the g-men associated to the airplane, and the g-men interested in him because of his father. I suspect not all of these folks are real and I am not sure who the bartender interacted with (I'd have to reread it). Anyway, that is just a suspicion. I'm not firmly convinced either way.

[@ItsTooLatetoApologize]

@@t0dd000 this is an interesting theory considering Bobby was a race car driver which is one big chase, the goal in which is to stay ahead of those chasing. If you can stay ahead, you win, but Bobby is now scared and conscious of his frailty. 🤔 But is the chase always real?

[@Ozgipsy]

Yes, I caught the “redness” comment.

[@levonhill]

#Thepassenger

[@t0dd000]

I suspect McCarthy struggles with character because I think he personally is probably more like Bobby and Alicia than he is like the rest of us.

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Maybe so. I saw a comment one time that said that McCarthy writes in the epic tradition, under which characters are defined solely by their actions, which would explain why he so often seems to have no interest in showing us the character's thoughts. I've often found his characters so opaque and they often make such odd decisions that I occasionally get frustrated by his refusal to let us in on their thought processes. But The Passenger was much better in that regard I thought, because we actually get to read some of Bobby's thoughts, so that factored in majorly into my high estimation of the book. :)

[@robertsmit1127]

Fallujah!

[@TH3F4LC0Nx]

Ahh, I see somebody knows where the intro music comes from! :D Could only use the intro to the song though, or else the copyright claims would kick in. XD

[@PrisonMike-_-]

Who is The Passenger? You are. The reader.