In 2013 the band The National played the song “Sorrow” for six consecutive hours as part of an art installation called, aptly enough, “A Lot of Sorrow.” I remember at the time feeling bad for the drummer and thinking that I didn’t really understand modern art.
“A Lot of Sorrow” popped back into my head this week as I tried to sort out my thoughts about Cormac McCarthy’s almost final novel, The Passenger. It’s a book that plays at being a thriller for a while: there’s a plane crash, a missing passenger, mysterious men in suits, a suspicious death. Then it sheds the various trappings of genre and plot like so much snakeskin, leaving the reader fully exposed to the waves of sorrow and grief that wash over its protagonist, a lot of sorrow indeed.
McCarthy’s body of work explores wide swaths of the human condition, from the gothic horror of his early work, to the tragicomedy of Suttree, the brutality of Blood Meridian, and the romance of the All the Pretty Horses trilogy. But all his novels share a raw bleakness that can sometimes feel overwhelming, particularly when the bleakness is the point, as in The Road, my least favorite of his books.
I was delighted to discover that The Passenger is McCarthy’s funniest book since Suttree, but like Suttree the juxtaposition of silliness and tragedy is almost too much to bear. It’s a book of conversations between the protagonist, Bobby Western, and a motley pack of ne’er-do-wells, salvage divers, private eyes, and government spooks, punctuated by his sister’s conversations with her own hallucinations. As we progress through the book, Western is alone more and more frequently, first on a Florida oil rig, then in a shack on the Gulf Coast, and finally in an abandoned farm house in Idaho. These moments are the most affecting in the book; being left alone with Western means being left alone with his pain and sorrow.
The tragedy here is that Western is in love with his sister Alicia, who is a) his sister and b) dead by her own hand. McCarthy gets compared with Faulkner fairly often, and this element of the novel feels like a call back to The Sound and the Fury, but despite the similar rhythm of their names, Bobby Western is not Quentin Compson, but more of a mirror image. Quentin kills himself. Western lives on in the wake of his sister’s suicide and wanders this way and that, buffeted by events but untransformed by them.
So yeah, that’s pretty bleak. The novel works because the ancillary characters are not overwhelmed by sorrow or particularly concerned about how sad and serious the world can be. The best of these characters, John Sheddan, tells Western,
I’d thought to give my body to science but obviously they draw the line somewhere. Dykes is on record that there can be no burial without an environmental impact study. One might think cremation an option but there is the danger of the toxins taking out their scrubbers and leaving a swath of death and disease among the dogs and children downwind for an unforeseeable distance.
This is a necessary counterpoint to the chapters where Western is on his own:
He’d brought a couple of mousetraps back with him and he set them baited with cheese. The mice had pretty much taken over the kitchen. He turned down the lampwick until the flame was all but out and then lay back in silence. The first trap clicked. Then the second. He turned up the wick and got up and emptied the little warm bodies into the trash and set the traps again and lay down. Click. Click.
When he got to the second trap the little whitefooted mouse had both its front paws on the bail of the trap and was trying to push it up off its head. He lifted the bail and watched the little thing wobble off across the floor and then dropped both traps into the trash and went back to bed.
The elements of McCarthy’s style, the third person objective narration, the lack of punctuation other than the period, the description of every tedious human action probably isn’t for everyone. Personally, I appreciate how it presents the story in such a strange and particular way. It’s like viewing the world through the eyes of a god obsessed with movement and detail and blind to the motivations of man. It feels compellingly true; there’s a sense of vertigo when I pull back and remember that every sentence is a fragment of a greater piece of art rather than a simple statement of fact. Here’s another passage to illustrate what I mean:
He drove north. Small harriers stood along the powerlines. They lifted and circled and returned to the wire behind him. In the evening he sat on the roof of the truck and finished the tenderloin and studied the country. He pulled up the collar of his coat and watched the way the wind ransacked the grasses. Sudden furrows that ran and stopped. As if something unseen had bolted and lay crouching. He sipped the warm tea from his thermos and then stoppered it and unfolded his legs and jumped to the ground. But his foot had fallen asleep and when he landed he collapsed and fell into the ditch and lay there laughing.
McCarthy created that: he made the choice to have Western’s foot fall asleep and for Western to laugh rather than cry or swear, but in the act of reading it just feels true. Of course Western’s foot fell asleep and he laughed at himself; that’s just how the world works, how people work.
There’s so much more I’d like to say about the vast strangeness of this novel. The way Alicia’s primary hallucination, the Thalidomide Kid, butchers the English language (my favorite: “carrion bags”). How gently McCarthy treats Western’s doomed love. The wild conversations about the Vietnam War, the atomic bomb, the JFK assassination. Alicia and Bobby’s unsuccessful attempts to grill her hallucinations about how they get from place to place (they take the bus, apparently).
I imagine that someone teaching this book might be tempted by an obvious essay prompt: Who is the passenger in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Passenger? I know how to ace that one: sorrow is the passenger, omnipresent and devastating. I’d prefer something a little more complicated: early in the novel Sheddan reminds Western of how they are connected by their mutual love of books, and tells him that “any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire.” What about the world does McCarthy want to burn down?