I don’t know if Cormac McCarthy ever watched Top Gun, but if he did, I imagine his takeaway wasn’t about speed, danger, or existential musings on mortality. No, he probably saw Tom Cruise brooding in a cockpit and thought, “That’s the guy. But what if he was a math nerd, too?” And thus, we have The Passenger, a book that’s equal parts philosophy lecture, hardboiled noir, and a man staring wistfully at the ocean wondering where his Maserati went. It’s ambitious, it’s bleak, and it’s got that signature McCarthy flair for making you feel like life is a cold, dark void where even the punctuation has abandoned hope. But is it good? Well… let’s just say I don’t regret reading it, but I also don’t regret not buying it in hardcover.
If patience is a virtue, then Cormac McCarthy is basically a literary monk. He reportedly started working on The Passenger back in 1980, which means this book took longer to hit shelves than some people’s entire careers. In the time it took him to finish this, Die Hard became a Christmas classic, the Soviet Union collapsed, and we all learned that Pluto isn’t a planet anymore. The novel sat in drafts, notes, and possibly coffee-stained napkins for decades, while McCarthy worked on other lighthearted projects like The Road, a book about nuclear devastation and cannibalism. When the novel was first mentioned in 2009, McCarthy teased it as a story about a brother and sister, with the sister already dead—because of course she is. The book simmered in development for another six years before officially getting announced, proving once and for all that McCarthy is not the guy you call if you need something on a deadline.
Knopf finally released The Passenger in October 2022, with its companion novel, Stella Maris, following six weeks later. That’s right—after making us wait 40 years, McCarthy pulled a “double album” move, like a literary version of Use Your Illusion I & II. It was a bold strategy, and depending on your perspective, it was either a gift to fans or a test of our collective endurance. The books were marketed as two sides of the same existential coin—The Passenger being a sprawling, fragmented journey of a man on the run, and Stella Maris being a 200-page transcript of Alicia Western talking to a psychiatrist about math, schizophrenia, and, presumably, how much she resents her brother for getting the more exciting book. It’s an unconventional approach, but then again, McCarthy has never been one for conventional storytelling—or, you know, quotation marks.
If there’s one thing The Passenger doesn’t do, it’s hold your hand. The novel was met with a mix of admiration, frustration, and the literary equivalent of people shrugging and saying, “Well, it’s McCarthy.” Critics praised the prose, because let’s be honest, even when McCarthy is making you feel like an idiot, he does it with beautifully crafted sentences. The Guardian called it a “glorious sunset song of a novel,” which sounds poetic but also kind of suggests that it’s a really long goodbye. Not everyone was on board, though. Many critics (and let’s be real, readers on Goodreads) found the book infuriatingly opaque. The whole “mystery” about the missing airplane passenger? Yeah, McCarthy doesn’t care about resolving that. Some praised his bold decision to make a plot that actively resists clarity, while others just wished he’d given them a few more breadcrumbs to follow. If No Country for Old Men was a lean, propulsive thriller, The Passenger is the book that sat next to it at a bar, ordered a whiskey, and started rambling about quantum mechanics until you left.
Still, for all its frustrating elements, The Passenger has a certain gravitational pull. It’s a book that challenges, confounds, and occasionally rewards the reader with moments of brilliance. It’s not McCarthy’s best, but it’s McCarthy doing McCarthy—just with more math and fewer gunfights.
If you’re a McCarthy fan, you’ll probably appreciate The Passenger—even if you don’t fully understand it. If you’re new to his work, maybe start with something a little more forgiving (The Road, perhaps?). Ultimately, this book is like one of those long road trips where you’re not quite sure where you’re going, but the scenery is nice enough that you don’t really mind. Just be prepared for a lot of detours and no clear destination.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)
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