Not P. Cormac

Thu Oct 20 19:09:38 UTC 2022

 www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/books/review/cormac-mccarthy-passenger.html

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Cormac McCarthy’s New Novel: Two Lives, Two Ways of Seeing

In “The Passenger,” a pair of siblings contend with the world’s enigmas and their own demons.
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By John Jeremiah Sullivan• Oct. 19, 2022THE PASSENGER, by Cormac McCarthy________________________________________The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan. You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way.The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, “The Passenger” — alongside its twisted sister, “Stella Maris,” which comes out later this year — kept making me think about the word “portentous.” Not finding this word identified as a Janus anywhere, I hereby nominate it for candidacy. “Portentous,” according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, “eliciting amazement” and “being a grave or serious matter.” But it can also mean “self-consciously solemn” and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence. There is bravery involved, especially at heights of style where the difference can be between greatness and straight badness. He teeters more in these new books than in the several novels for which he is judged a great American writer.The first paragraph of “The Passenger” works as a microcosm of the problem. It paints a barren scene, a snowy field in which a young woman has hanged herself: “It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones.” Before you’ve even settled in, McCarthy has thrown “and” at you four times, a word that both splits and fuses. You hear Hemingway and the curious loudness of those supposedly clipped and stripped-down sentences. Something attention-seeking in the syntax. I read this novel when I was recovering from the infantilizing misery of a 15-millimeter kidney stone, and my 11-year-old daughter read parts of it to me because the pain pills made me want to barf when I tried to read, and at one point she put down the book and said, “Why does he say AND so much!”Still, it was a thrill to hear new McCarthy sentences read aloud. The teetering wouldn’t be interesting if he weren’t capable of those spellbinding descriptive passages, a trademark. In the first paragraph he does one of his McCarthy things and makes you look up a chewy old word, “stogged.” The hunter who finds the woman, we are told, knelt and “stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him.” To be stogged is to be stuck in the snow or mud. You can also stog something into the snow, like a stake. The way McCarthy deploys it, you hear what it means even before you know.
But the paragraph descends into the wrong kind of portentous. The hunter “thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing.” (Really? “Have mercy on her soul”? He’d not that?) We read that the woman has tied a red sash around her dress, providing “some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” (What pathetic fallacy is this? Who has scrupled in creating this desolation?) Then we are told that this is happening “on this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.” (Did people, in some far-flung time, used to say “spoken” to mean risen or begun — parallel, perhaps, to “morning is broken”? No. I checked.) As for this Christmas Day, it will turn out that the woman hanging there is Jewish.Much of “The Passenger” happens in a room, or a couple of rooms, where the same scene, with variations, runs on a loop. I suspect that many readers will resist or resent spending as much time there as we do. I came to find the goings-on sometimes captivating, but almost feel that I am covering for my abuser in confessing that. The young woman, Alicia, lies in bed. She’s schizophrenic, in the last year of her life. Her room is visited by a succession of vaudeville phantoms and spectral sideshow acts. Their spokesman, a kind of impresario, is the Thalidomide Kid, or the Kid for short.Another of McCarthy’s novels features a character called the Kid: “Blood Meridian,” considered his best book by some (though I will always prefer the earlier, Tennessee novels — “Outer Dark,” “Suttree” — to the later westerns; the former had an otherworldliness that in the latter risked stiffening into a sort of baroque machismo). There’s at least a possibility that the Kid in “The Passenger” represents a zombified summoning of the earlier one, only in this incarnation he has witnessed the 20th century and been thoroughly damaged by it. He is Alicia’s hallucination — tiny, dwarfish, vaguely middle-aged, with flipperlike hands. “He rubbed his flippers together,” McCarthy writes. “As if to warm them.” He harangues Alicia, but we can tell that he wants to save her. She makes it plain that she wants him to leave, but McCarthy lets us suspect that she would miss him, or that she knows it will be the end of something when he is gone.Alicia is a genius, one of the greatest mathematical minds on earth. She is probably the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. Men question their life choices when they see her. Her brother, Bobby, is also good-looking and smart but not on her level. It’s from knowing her that he has learned what a real genius is and that he is not one, and this realization has led to a lifelong depression. He is in love with her, and she with him. There is a frustrated incest theme. They have spent most of their lives yearning for each other, but the taboo is too strong.

We first meet Bobby on the job. His last name is Western because these novels are about the fate and impending destruction of the Western world. His work: salvage diver. If that’s still too sissy an occupation for you, he has previously been a racecar driver in Europe. If you speak to him, he will reply in one or two terse sentences that question some guileless social assumption you made in whatever you said. “I need to talk to you,” for instance, gets back: “You are talking to me.” If a character says, “I thought you were supposed to know everything,” Bobby might reply: “I dont. What do you know about this airplane?” That “dont,” by the way, is sic. The author does that, he takes out the apostrophes. He told Oprah in a 2008 interview that he doesn’t like semicolons and quotation marks either. They clutter. Too many “weird little marks.” But the problem with clutter is distraction. And what is distracting are words that lack punctuation where ordinarily there would be some.
This first scene with Bobby Western is great, a reminder (just in time) of the elegance and force of good McCarthy. The whole setup is effective and creepy. It’s a frigid night in 1980, and a chartered plane has gone down in the Gulf of Mexico, not far from New Orleans. The team of divers to which Bobby belongs has been hired to go down and inspect. We observe the “tender,” the person who stays on the boat and directs the divers below:“The tender was lying on his elbows with the headset on watching the dark water beneath them. From time to time the sea would flare with a soft sulphurous light where forty feet down Oiler was working with the cuttingtorch. Western watched the tender and he blew on the tea and sipped it and he watched the lights moving along the causeway like the slow cellular crawl of waterdrops on a wire.”Slightly showy? If so, only with what Wallace Stevens called the “essential gaudiness” of the best poetry. The action passages underwater are also splendid. You are down there with them by the wreck, “the shape of the fuselage tunneling off into the dark.” You drift past “the hulking nacelles that held the turbofan engines” (nacelles: those streamlined shells around the engines, a surprisingly old word in English, 15th century, referring originally to a tiny ship).When the divers get into the plane, they find that one of the bodies is missing. There are eight passengers on the manifest but only seven on board. Has someone escaped, after first causing the crash? Or, even more ominous, has the site been visited already, and a body removed? Throughout much of the rest of the story, shadowy men who represent powerful agencies visit Bobby and rummage through his stuff, or threaten to rough him up. They think he knows something about the plane. They themselves either know something about it, or don’t and are frustrated by that. This state of affairs never quite rises to the level of plot, but it does establish paranoid atmosphere.Bobby and Alicia Western grew up together in east Tennessee. Their parents worked at Oak Ridge, where their father, a physicist, helped design and fabricate the atom bomb. He was a genius from the North, their mother a local. There is writerly self-mythologizing here, not in the sense of narcissism, but in the way that most writers turn the idiosyncratic facts of their biographies into maps of reality. McCarthy’s father, Charles — that’s Cormac’s real name, too — was likewise from the North, and came to east Tennessee in the employ of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency that, in bringing electrical power to the rural South, had a hand in the erasure of swaths of that region’s folk culture. The T.V.A. also provided the power to the Oak Ridge facility, making possible certain atomic experiments of the early 1940s, the work that finally destroys the world in McCarthy’s Spenglerian-gothic vision (and in his apocalyptic road novel, “The Road”).The Westerns made me think about the real-life McCarthys and see them in a different light, a useful one, in grappling with the writer’s oeuvre. I hadn’t thought before about how other he had grown up. Irish Catholics in the mid-South, for starters; clearly the Westerns’ Jewishness stands in for the McCarthys’ Catholicism. His parents were well-educated Yankees (Cormac himself was born in Rhode Island) who lived in a nice house in a section strewn with shacks and sent the kids to parochial school. McCarthy’s mother, Gladys, hosted tea parties for Wellesley alumni. His pretty, thick-browed sisters won spelling bees and got scholarships to go elsewhere. They were aliens in that country.All of which makes it sort of marvelous that McCarthy inherited the mantle of the Great Southern Writer. His background doesn’t diminish the achievement. It may help to account for it some — dwelling in the midst of a society but seeing it from the outside, with heightened sensitivity and detached sensibility. On the other hand, The Knoxville Journal records that, as a boy, McCarthy was “accidentally shot in both legs” one night, as he and “another child were playing with an old .22 rifle,” so we know that local influences seeped in. Sense of place, as they say.
The two novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” are siblings, and each is given over to a sibling. Or mainly given over. There is plenty of Alicia and her chamber of hallucinations in “The Passenger,” which is ultimately Bobby’s book. “Stella Maris,” however, takes the form of a long Q. and A. between Alicia and her shrink at a mental institution. Several sessions. We know going in that these will end in Alicia’s suicide in the snow. Her side of the exchange is in part a transcription of a disintegrating mind.
Critics have commented on the lack of deeply observed female characters in McCarthy’s work. The women tend to be either far-off objects of erotic reverence or momentary grotesques or prostitutes. The novelist himself has spoken of challenges in this regard. “I don’t pretend to understand women,” he told Oprah. “I think men don’t know much about women.” Some took this for chauvinism, but I wonder if it wasn’t just a radical version of what makes us queasy when, for instance, a white woman writes a book about Mexican immigrants. He didn’t feel that he had the right. If that was the case, he has changed his mind and decided to go for it.Alicia dissects and defends herself in these pages, telling her life. She is so good at math that there are only a few people in the world with whom she can have an intelligent conversation, and they are full of issues. She hates and pities and respects her therapist. I found her not totally unconvincing, and more convincing than Bobby, who remains a sort of metaphysical Marlboro man. I’m not sure why Alicia’s therapy transcripts have been made a separate volume, in “Stella Maris.” That is, I’m not sure why McCarthy felt that “The Passenger” could absorb her hallucinations but not her treatment. Seems arbitrary, as formal choices go. He chose to cleave the story but he could have let the stories cleave.“The Passenger” is far from McCarthy’s finest work, but that’s because he has had the nerve to push himself into new places, at the age of all-but-90. He has tried something in these novels that he’d never done before: I don’t mean writing a woman (although there’s that), but writing normal people. Granted, these normal people are achingly good-looking and some of the smartest people in the world and they speak in lines, but they are not mythic. Or they are mythic but not entirely so. They have childhoods and stunted or truncated adulthoods. They go to restaurants and bars and visit their friends. I think those may have been my favorite parts, in fact, a handful of scenes in New Orleans restaurants, featuring good, pointless side characters, including a subtly drawn trans woman who seems to be in love with Bobby, and a work friend who explains to him what his problem is.The kind of guy you are, the friend says, “people will say things about you that they wont say to you.”Yes, “wont” — it is his wont. But that sentence: It’s the kind of thing a person would say to you. I can almost imagine another writer writing it. Made me feel seen, somehow. It prompted thoughts of Edward Said’s famous essay on “late style,” the changes that affect a writer’s work in the final stages of a career. Said detected a Janus quality in this evolution, a “power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” Making this possible is a “mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.” If that’s what’s happening to McCarthy, we may yet see “late” novels that stand with his best.
John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and a founder of Third Person Project, a nonprofit research collective in Wilmington, N.C.

    On Thursday, October 20, 2022 at 02:54:48 PM EDT, Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:  

 see also Hemingway's The Garden of Eden (not entirely fair because he
didn't finish it, but still)

or, and dare I say this? (sure, because it might start an interesting
argument!), Pynchon after Against the Day... (or maybe after M&D?!)

On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 2:10 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> The reviewer does make it feel as if McCarthy has jumped the shark with
> this one. And his observation that when McCarthy focuses on the day-to-day
> life and interactions of Western, the main character, that real
> profundities emerge, does ring true.
>
> I don’t know if it’s applicable here, but the architect Frank Loyd Wright
> was an undeniable genius,and his work anticipated avant-garde modernism,
> which was to follow and supersede his work from across the shore in
> Europe.  But Frank Loyd Wright’s work during his senior years was far from
> genius.  in fact,  some of it is just schlocky.
>
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 3:30 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the reviewer, whom I know, likes old-fashioned "life and life only
>> fiction" basically....that remark about Melville for example...
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 2:36 PM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > So this will be his "Ratner's Star"?
>> >
>> > it's too bad they gave the book to a grumpy reviewer. of course after a
>> > huge career there's an (inevitable?) slide in to what seems to younger
>> > readers like self parody
>> >
>> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 6:20 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/18/cormac-mccarthy-novel-passenger/
>> >> --
>> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> >>
>> >
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l