Decades after ‘The Road,’ Cormac McCarthy returns with Gulf Coast dramas

Yet The Passenger , which was released in October, is frustratingly inert, ambling from one sit-down to the next, a string of static, epistemological discussions in bars and restaurants and private-eye offices. New Orleans is perhaps the most interesting city in America to eat and drink in, but these scenes are often shapeless and make sparing use of their surroundings. In Suttree , the McCarthy novel from 1979 that The Passenger sometimes recalls, a half-page stop at a diner wrings more character and dramatic tension from a coffee cup and spoon than can be found in a couple of these interminable lunches.

It is refreshing to read McCarthy, though, in a mode so much looser than The Road , where everything and nothing was metaphor. The Passenger is more than intermittently funny; a drunk slipping on bowling shoes sheepishly concedes that his good boots are probably “in a bowling alley somewhere.” Long one of the greatest writers of the American Southwest, McCarthy offers consistently enrapturing descriptions of land and wildlife—in the Gulf, northeast to Tennessee, back west, eventually to Spain. The Passenger also includes some of the most harrowing imagery in a career full of it. Here is McCarthy describing the bombing of Hiroshima:

That McCarthy, at age 89, and after a 16-year silence, can pull this sort of terror from near-nowhere—the Hiroshima passage comes two paragraphs after one that begins, “In the evening he went down to the bar and got a hamburger and a beer”—is almost bewildering. Elsewhere, he dazzles in familiar ways, exhibiting his usual keen feel for the slow rhythms of difficult physical work. It’s a shame that the book’s shagginess, on a structural level and occasionally in the micro, blunts these qualities.

Fortunately, there is a corrective. Stella Maris , the much slimmer companion novel which comes out this week—and which can be read independently, despite its connections to the earlier book—deepens The Passenger 's themes of complicity and control and finds a more novel shape to contain them. Set a decade before its predecessor, it consists entirely of transcribed conversations between Bobby's younger sister, Alicia, and a psychiatrist at the Wisconsin hospital for which the book is named. The Passenger opens with the aftermath of Alicia’s apparent suicide and is dotted with scenes between her and strange figures she hallucinates. Those pages are tedious and make Alicia seem like a caricature of the troubled young genius. But Stella Maris reveals her, a math prodigy who graduated from the University of Chicago at 16—whose doctoral candidacy has been her holing up in motel rooms around the country, reading Gödel and rarely eating—as a mesmerizingly troubled character and superb verbal sparrer.

The sessions are precisely written. The Tennessee-born Alicia lets slip exactly two regionalisms over the course of 190 pages, and her considered, hyperliterate style of speech is made more endearing and more believable by a sense of humor that can be barbed but always scans as a bit nervous. (The psychiatrist, doubting a typically arresting detail: “You’re having fun with me.” Alicia: “Not much.”) So deftly does McCarthy avoid the twin crutches of dialogue-only prose writing—the overdetermined idiosyncrasies and the over narration of physical action—that reading the book frequently feels like eavesdropping.

There are tangents: Alicia’s desire to marry her brother and have his children; her startlingly detailed process for ruling out drowning as a potential avenue to suicide. But her conversations are dominated by theoretical math and what that discipline can and can’t tell us about our physical world, our very existence. “Sometime in the early twentieth century it finally became impossible for anyone to understand all of it,” she says at one point, in reference to math—though she could just as easily be alluding to the “ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world” that lingers in her mind.

Alicia and Bobby’s father was a physicist who helped Oppenheimer build the bomb. Both siblings describe him being untroubled by it. “Whoever made the bomb was going to blow something up with it,” Alicia theorizes, “and I'm sure he thought better us than them.” She sees the Manhattan Project as one of the most significant events in human history, and of Hiroshima as a totalizing evil. What’s less clear to her is that her father, or even Truman, was a significant actor in it. In her unnerving view, humans have been left with little but our subconscious and faulty sensory roadmaps with which to navigate. In other words, we’re all just along for the ride.

The Passenger and Stella Maris are now available.