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Thank you for making this vid. I want to watch a bunch of reviews of this book - I just finished it - one of the most challenging reads (in fiction) I've ever had. I'll read it again eventually and will take notes. Having never read McCarthy, I didn't realize how complex and deep it was going to be... I'd like to beg to differ on your idea that Western takes on a new identity, even that Kline was urging him to do so. Kline was certainly urging Bobby to leave, and setting up a new identity was one of the options they discussed. You're right, I agree, that their discussions on this topic are relevant. I think the author is careful to show us that Bobby did leave and did not create a new identity. On the final pages he receives a letter from Akron, OH, the owner of the bodega knows it's for Bobby - - he hadn't changed his name. The missing passenger in the opening chapter is both symbolic and pertinent to the plot: this implication of nefarious activity is what makes Bobby a "person-of-interest", a turns him into a person on the run - a path he fills more and more throughout the story. In the end he does leave and finds peace in his new home off the coast of Spain, living much the same as he did in his final days in New Orleans - walking the beach, going into town for a drink, contemplating his world. Now, though, he has picked up an early interest, one he abandoned many years ago, he starts thinking about mathematics again, and sends away for papers by famous physicists/mathematicians. He contentedly waits for death, where he may be reunited with his sister.

I can't imagine how much work it took!!

Loved this book, though nothing compares to the the SNOWMAN.

I know McCarthy was very intrigued with metaphysics, but I found the length of time it was discussed in "Stella Maris" was a tad much. I found this book the least accessible of all of Cormac McCarthy's works due to the long parrying discussions between Alicia and the doctor. What was missing for me was the colorful scene-setting that has become his trademark. Whereas I have reread and and will continue to reread all of his other works, I feel little compulsion to reread this one. Maybe in time. I think I might have said the same thing about "The Crossing", but found myself reading it again after the third time recently. Guess we'll see. Thanks.

Your review made me realize the strange symmetry between the passenger and Stella maris(which is essential) western supposes she is dead and in Stella Maris she presumes he is dead. Hah! Turns out McCarthy was a romantic. As deeply and darkly as they come

Thankyou for the review on this book it certainly gets you emotionally we are all passengers passing through life carrying the weight of life. Things are outside our control and we search for meaning good review

Am impressed that you can just speak extemporaneously. Just finished SM and was enthralled. PS was thrilled by the wit of the interactions. The audio-book has a male and a woman playing the parts. I know people pooh-pooh audio-books but this format worked like a radio-play. I was left wit ha deep admiration for those who can withstand their own extremely high intellect without misusing it. But suicide is the only real cure to that sort of loneliness maybe? Don't know. Such a valuable pair of books.

This is such a great review. I just read these novels and I’m blown away by them. The Passenger in particular is an amazing book.

that was the most astute insightful bookreview I have ever watched and I am 56 years old.Keep up the amazing work

Interesting selection.

But there WAS a consummation of their love, the Passenger describes their abortion...

I just read this recently for book club and it was a heavy book. I listened on audio and I for sure had to take breaks. I'm still left without words on the whole thing and look forward to chatting with someone who has read it.

Just finished your video. I appreciated your point of view, partly due to the things that you saw or thought that I had not. I've read "The Passenger" twice and found it very moving. I've lived in New Mexico for the past two years. I grew up in Tennessee and my mother grew up in Knoxville where my father met her. One of my relatives worked at Oak Ridge. I lived in Louisiana for ten years. All locations for parts of the book. McCarthy lived the life many admire and very few have the determination and perseverance to live. I'll probably reread "The Passenger" and also "Stella Maris" (which I've read once). I don't expect perfectly logical connections with literally everything in McCarthy's books. One example being how we find The Kid appearing to Bobby as well as Alicia. With their deep emotional connection as well as being siblings might be enough.

I have read Out of Darkness and the book is really good but yes,there are also a few heavy topics where I had to stop and close the book. Then I would start reading again….this book was very interesting and it really opens my eyes. It was a fantastic read ❤

Great review!

Thank you, great food for thought and for my third read of these two books. Since my second read, i have gone back to all of his books, except the Counselor, and No Country..., Suttree may be my favorite. The Stonemason is next. You have really started to unwrap the puzzle. I have some thoughts about the Kid and his entourage coming to her at twelve. These " hallucinated" personalities can be created to cope with having been a child victim of rape.

Beautiful analysis of this work and it speaks to me on a personal level as a very close voice whispering in my ear. I'm curious what is your take on the ending, it feels like Bobby is kind of retiring from society, which would be very bleak. Also as others have said, you should try Suttree. It's touches on a similar theme but from a different angle. Fewer long conversations and more descriptions. Things are not stated as much as felt.

I enjoyed sundial but I agree it does not approach the last... certainly redemptively. And your touching on husbands one dimensional character relates to my feeling that too much effort and time was put into some characters and not enough in others. I still enjoyed (can one enjoy her books?) this more than the average psychological thriller and felt the fact that it was different from her others reads makes me hope her future books will be far more varied than one comes to expect from writers in this genre.

Great review! I loved both The Passenger and Stella Maris. Beautifully existential and lonely.

Ban it from a school library, sure. But leave it accessible for the public to read. Good books areeverywhere. Kids don't need books about sex, fam. And this is coming from a genuine sl*t: leave the dirty stuff for grown ups, mkay?

If you didn't appreciate "Blood Meridian "or "All the pretty horses" and saw the movie first , you have NO credibility . The Road is nowhere near McCarthy's best .

Hey, thanks for that review! It definitely feels encouraging to hear other finding something special in these. I enjoyed reading both books, one after the other, and was deeply moved by them, actually so much, that I couldn’t touch another book for a while after. It’s probably true that there won’t be too many people reading them but for me it’s clear that I will definitely read them again.

These last two novels are pathetic.

reading slowly is good

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.

I agree "active vs passive" is a major theme or point. (Arguably this was also a theme of the Kid in Blood Meridian.) The passenger is one who waits to arrive at a predetermined destination, as opposed to a traveler or driver who is...free...to choose or change destinations.

I'm a former physicist current neuroscientist who recently discovered McCarthy via Blood Meridian, which blew me away. I'm about 3/4 of the way through the Passenger and also loving this, even though it is quite different in some ways.

You're the first person I've heard make the connection to Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland, though that's also what jumped out at me in the Alicia sections. Like a dark Alice in Wonderland. Also like Philip K Dick.

Great book, brings to mind Coetzee. Definitely both full of ideas AND overwrought. Not for the whine-averse. I was very disappointed when Bobby saw the Kid; as it broke the internal consistency of the book's universe. Jumped the shark, as it were. Ending way too whiney and inconclusive.

This is one of my favourite reviews. I might give the book a read.

Im picking out a banned book for an english paper, this review was extremely helpful! Thank you!

Great Review! I thought it was very well paced. Happy to see a review more focused on themes and ideas rather than linguistic technicalities 👍

Nice

What about the final letter from Akron, Ohio that he refused to accept while in his final exile? Any idea who that might have been from? Wasn't that where his father and grandmother were from/lived? Does that imply that someone knows where he is?

excellent review. thank you. i read it as a multi-layered view into death. I recommend the audio version - its well down.

Great fucking review

Outstanding reviews of a difficult work.

Sounds really bad and just banking of the popularity of the trans movement

I agree it's like reading poetry! The formatting is so cool. Her writing is beautiful ! :) I really liked it a lot. She got me back into reading. It was fun watching your review!

Thank you for this nice analysis! I just finished reading Scattered, and all I could think was that this book was very weird. I'm definitely interested in whatever comes next, though!

I'm the author, and I so enjoyed hearing your thoughts about the book! Thank you for reading deeply and widely. I'm honored by the comparison to Toni Morrison. <3

Thank you so much for this review. I've just finished this wonderful book and now will reread it illuminated by your insights. His writing has the same effect on me as Alicia's description of music 'But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.'. You have helped my comprehension of this novel

Martin Amis said that , "There are some authors you can read but others you can only RE-READ. I think Cormac McCarthy is firmly in this category. I've been re-reading The Passenger and looking at reviews to try and get my head round it. Your video is a good part of this process, it's like a virtual book group I suppose. I admire your articulacy and enjoyed the video. " Cheers. "

I honestly thought he was dead

not enjoying Blood Meridian? dafuq. It’s literally the greatest american novel, its a fever dream of good and evil…. It more art than a novel i guess.

It feels like Rob took Callie to Sundial without any plans, they just went for hikes lol

Loved the review. Cannot wait to read the book. Like you The Road and No Country for Old Men really grabbed me.

What do you make of the last chapter being given a Roman numeral like only Alicia's chapters were?

Great insight and analysis of an amazing piece of work. There are very few times I can count in which I’ve been brought to tears in a book. I can add this one. If you didn’t feel the words being whittled away to reveal a perfect and heartfelt conversation with Debbie, you need to rethink your life.

Thanks for talking about Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight. I only heard it from this video/channel. I read it recently and... though it was rather unusual and strange, it was also quite an incredible and thoughtful read.