Slow Train Coming
Review of "The Passenger" (2022)
Cormac McCarthy. The Passenger. Knopf, 2022. 383pp.
It’s a curious experience reading The Passenger as the US and Israel eviscerate Iran. You get the feeling that both events have been a long time coming. A certain slouching inevitability to proceedings. The revolutionary council was never going to be permitted operational use of nuclear weapons; since the 1980s it has been clear that if the course was not abandoned then a day of reckoning was always going to come. Similarly, there’s a certain inexorable logic — not to mention a neat Blackstar-esque choreography — to Cormac McCarthy’s bid farewell to the twentieth century, writing, and indeed, his own storied life.
A panoply of voices, The Passenger feels like a summation of everything from the last American century: the Manhattan Project, Vietnam, the assassination of JFK, the power of the US government to truly fuck you up, monumental loss, ravaging mental illness, the loneliness of a room, and the inevitable deaths of vibrant young Americans who, in their own way, tried to be free, but were sacrificed to the unstoppable forces of history and science. Demons, both.