NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • The story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR "Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now. 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

We tried really hard to make something out of The Passenger. There were certainly compelling parts of the book and the writing and sense of place (in weirdo, lowlife New Orleans) was frequently quite strong. But despite our best interpretive efforts, we simply could not figure out what this book was about or why it was written. First, know that the descriptions of this novel are misleading. You are led by the blurbs to believe this book is a mystery about what happened to a missing passenger on a sunken plane. It's not; that plot isn't pursued further after chapter 2. Instead, what we get are a long chain of one-on-one or one-on-two conversations that our protagonist Western, one of the divers who discovered the plane crash, has with people around New Orleans. Western had an incestuous mutual love for his sister who committed suicide and the book jumps between moments in the sister's life in which she has hallucinations about a strange circus that performs in her room and Western traveling around Louisiana talking to friends, criminals, fellow divers, and other quirky and shady characters while he believes he's being pursued by agents, either in regards to the plane crash or in regards to his father, a researcher on the Manhattan Project. Oh, and Western was also a math major who dropped out to become a Formula Two race car driver. Following all this? We didn't, or at least none of it added up. We kept trying to line up the pieces of the biography with the conversations with the images in the memories with the plot of Western evading some mysterious surveillance, but we just couldn't find any throughline. We might have given the book the benefit of the doubt here, but there were also some just awful passages that tried our good will. Seriously, who wants to read an entire chapter of summarized gossip about the findings and intellectual arguments of nuclear physicists? This is no exaggeration -- there is an entire chapter that is just a character asking Western questions about different physicists and Western summarizing their theories and then dropping some slangy asides about who hated whom. That is just pretentious indulgence on McCormick's part, and from the lens of that chapter, so is the whole book. It's not in any way badly written and some of the characters and settings are quite strong, but it's aimless and pointless and it lounges in idle conversations that are meant to give insight or build threat or explore themes but actually do nothing at all. As a whole, it's a vanity project of McCormick's that doesn't add up to anything. We can't say it's a bad novel -- he's too good a writer to do that -- but we also can't say you should read it. All you'll do is wonder what you missed that was at the center of the book, only to realize the answer was nothing.