I was surprised upon reading them both earlier this year. After seeing/hearing the mediocre reception after it’s release, I decided I had to read them for myself. I found the passenger to be extremely powerful and emotional on many levels. It felt like an authors final embrace to his readers, and it was extremely despairing as per usual w/ Cormac. I truly feel these books won’t be appreciated for some time yet, not until after they have had time to sink into his canon. There is so much to uncover beneath the surface and in many ways they feel at times like a maze to navigate through. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but a beautiful work nonetheless.
Thank you very much for your work. I didn't proceed with a literature phd but do miss this discourse immensely. I pursued a different career, so your videos are my connection to the world I once was a part of.
I loved The Passenger and think it was more complex than you give it credit for, I think there was a lot of Shakespeare influence (which is always a plus for me) in the Sheddan character and I think he kind of undercut Bobby and Alice's worldview in a way that complicated things. Tbh Sheddan is probably my favorite character in all of McCarthy's work. Unfortunately, I basically totally agree with you on Stella Maris. The only parts I really liked were just the extra plot details one uncovers throughout the dialogue that served to flesh out The Passenger more.
This review, like most of his reviews, is very surface level. He never does the deep dive thing except for a few books here and there. I wasn't expecting it from him anyway however.
I related very strongly to the Passenger because I live and grew up in the New Orleans area. It was very obvious McCarthy also lived here and felt at home with the very different society. People who didn’t fit in, persons wanting to escape, geniuses who became divers and befriended other outcasts were plentiful in the “City that Care Forgot”. There were successful trans people, notorious mobsters, incredible researchers, talented musicians, novelists, artists. My favorite passages were when the extremely damaged Bobby free associated his despair on the road to Idaho, on the beaches in Mississippi, visiting the former home in Knoxville. The experiences of Bobby made it difficult to distinguish dreams from reality. Stella Maris vibe was totally opposite from the Passenger-as was Alicia to Bobby. She seemed very clinical to almost robotic while Bobby was very emotional and passionate. I couldn’t finish a passage where she was describing drowning. I wasn’t disturbed about the airline crash not being resolved-it was one of the plots in pathetic Bobby Western!s living nightmares.
Great reviews! I read The Road and Blood Meridian back in the day, probably too young and inexperienced, and I never got excited about them very much. I've seen praises and praises of McCarthy's work and only now after hearing your mixed reviews I'm actually interested in picking up his book again.
While Suttree never resonated with me at all and I always gave up reading it after ten pages or so it was very different with these two. - Even if it were juvenile I couldn't see anything wrong with that. I was a highschool teacher, and now retired, I miss the students a lot, exactly because they were "juvenile", that means for me they were curious, open to discussing ideas and don't pretend to know everything already, what makes "grown ups" so boring and uninteresting to talk with in comparison. - I think you cannot read Stella Maris fast, maybe I am just stupid or senile, but i had to read it slowly and passages twice to understand it all. Now, when I did understand it right, the questions and allusions seem to me to dig really deep. I know of no other writer who even comes close to tackle subjects like in Stella Maris. Like to relate the questionable ontology of math to the problem of evel. To me that is a really thrilling idea. But, okay, I'm a juvenile boomer ;) .
DFW's new sincerity was precisely trying to tackle this same issue. Of anti-intellectuals relegating everything to pretentious ramble once the wisdom starts sliding off their relatively smoother brains. So ironic that those with these claims are probably the least wise of them all.
Good review, and some interesting thoughts on the works. :) I know I'm likely in a minority, but for me The Passenger is McCarthy's greatest work; "greatest" maybe not so much in flawless execution but rather in reach and ambition. The themes are broad and grand, and the characters I thought were the most fully realized that he ever wrote by a fairly large margin. Although I would have to politely disagree about the "grumpiness" or "boomerism" of the books. I thought the concerns raised were rather valid, and its observations rather astute. I do understand why the books might not jive with a lot of people, but for me personally I thought they were magnificent. :)
I thought either Cormac McCarthy didn't actually write the Passenger and Stella Maris or was forced to include certain themes in them. It seemed evident that he had to check certain talking point boxes to get them published or something.
It's something he does in all of his books (he builds his characters and their world through their dialogue) - I would say he does it most notably in Foucault's Pendulum!
Felt the same way. A few months after finishing I read Suttree. Hit me much harder - the reactionary gut instincts were churning out the feeling that something much deeper was going on beneath the language of that book. At times that came through with TP - SM, but the pair felted dwarfed by the healing quality of Sut's lonesome death-conscious mosaic.
Great review as always. Like others, I've been waiting for you to talk about these books. That aside, will you do Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, Brooklyn Crime Novel? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I read only The Passenger, and probably will have to reread it to get a more clear view of it, but my first thought was that the interests that mc carthy had in his final years, especially liviing in santa fe institute and being really interested in science, had a huge influence in this book, which wasn't particularly good to the storytelling. I mean, sometimes it seems that he creates dialogues just to show his knowledge about those dificult topics. I have a degree in engineering, so I found most of those parts cool, but at many timesthey dont have any connection to the plot itself. The characters sometimes appear to exist in the book only as a channel to the author expose part of his conversations and learning that he had in the institute during those final years. I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, but the I think that it works only when it helps to strenghten certain characters to the reader, I mean, to make them more real. In The Passenger, though, I don't think he achieved that in most of the book, because the characters in many passages look cold and, sometimes, like robots, and don't appear to be real at all. Having said all that, I've got to say that I really enjoyed reading it. He was a great writer.
@@TheBookchemist Don't forget about the dialogues, too. It felt off and unrealistic, almost DeLillian (not criticizing D., just making comparisons). McCarthy is known for writing realistic dialogues but this one just felt off.
When has McCarthy ever written a Character drama where the dialogue was meant to illuminate some character's psychology or move the plot forward? Maybe only Ncfom, a reworked screenplay. Vast majority of dialogue in McCarthy's oeuvre stands apart from the narrative. He wasn't going to change in the last two books. I thought the scientific rambles in Stella Maris were very well done and were relatively decent in the Passenger as well. These two books are undoubtedly meant as inquiry pieces. Philosophical works more than novelistic. The science is there as another aspect of the ideological tapestry. The conversation style is Socratic, which seems to reinforce my assumption.
It only feels like that because almost all other novelists don't pick these topics, so it is unusual. You could say most other authors show off their ideas about social relations or psychological problems etc. It doesn't feel to us that way because we are so much used to it. @@TheBookchemist
Umberto Eco resonates with me a bit more even when his work doesn't always click with me. Cormac McCarthy on the other hand tends to be complete hit or miss. The Passenger was a miss for me. Stella Maris I liked barring the technical talk which was at times interesting but also detracted imo from the emotional depth.
I think there is a sense of paranoia throughout both books. Like the scene with the IRS agent was way too unrealistic. I think it was a hallucination. Maybe Bobby has schizophrenia too.
Good review, thank you. I'm a fan of McCarthy's work but you articulated much better than I could a certain qualm I felt about his last pair of books - nothing that diminished my enjoyment, but just an edge or niggle of dissatisfaction. Stellar Maris I pretty much read as a philosophical work and I did register an incongruity in what felt like McCarthy's views being expressed through this very young woman. Your boomerism remark struck a chord. As an aside, I found it sad you felt it necessary to bend over backward apologising for your lack of effusive praise and assuring readers your critique didn't apply to them as people. If McCarthy was indeed expressing adolescent views, well maybe that's a reflection of our culture. The widespread propensity to take offense at things is about as adolescent as you can get.
I agree with your criticism of the juvenile angst. I also thought that Stella Maris was a vehicle for McCarthy to show off his years of studying advanced physics. It became oppressive.
It seems weird to criticize McCarthy for being over the top when his most "over the top" work (Blood meridian) is extremely historically accurate (and even then he toned down some of the carnage that visited the frontier during the 1850s, as reported by John Sepich). The problem seems to me the modern reader's unwillingness to even entertain these highly pessimistic ideas, unless wrapped in some dystopian, anti-capitalist narrative, when they suddenly become prescient simply because of their relevancy to modern life in a metropolis. Relatibility, perhaps, is the barrier. As I get older I seem to understand McCarthy's perspective more and more, and trust me no anti-natalist/nihilist was I ever, nor am now. Juvenile is the most ironic descriptor for these books imo. It's an issue of not being on the writer's wavelength, I believe. McCarthy is not over the top because he is unintentionally trying to parody himself, instead, as DFW very rightly pointed, it's the modern reader's unwillingness to meet anything serious as anything else but satire and parody. You can see the same reactions with another writer like Dostoevsky (although a prose stylist he surely was not, I agree). You mentioned Jonathan Lethem and it's precisely because of writers like him or writers with the same attitude as him that we no longer have Great contemporary writers like we used to in the 40s, 50s, 60s etc. I am not being cranky, modern mainstream fiction isn't competing with those early eras in terms of literary value. Part of the reason I think is because of this "anti-intellectual" attitude to anything serious. I am also surprised that The Road seemed so tense to him given a good 90% of the book has literally nothing happening in it.
Some of my favorite authors in the last few years have been writing fiction full of current media talking points including Cormac McCarthy and Louise Erdrich. If I didn't know better I'd think they were being strongly encouraged by someone or something to say certain things. The Passenger and Stella Maris didn't really seem like Cormac McCarthy wrote them. Same with the last 3 or so of Louise Erdrich's books. It seemed like a checklist of all of the common media talking points; aliens, George Floyd riots, mental health, transgenderism, abortion, Buddhism, etc. To me there was something slightly off about it if you know his work.
I was surprised upon reading them both earlier this year. After seeing/hearing the mediocre reception after it’s release, I decided I had to read them for myself. I found the passenger to be extremely powerful and emotional on many levels. It felt like an authors final embrace to his readers, and it was extremely despairing as per usual w/ Cormac.
I truly feel these books won’t be appreciated for some time yet, not until after they have had time to sink into his canon. There is so much to uncover beneath the surface and in many ways they feel at times like a maze to navigate through.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, but a beautiful work nonetheless.
They won't be appreciated until some hotshot critic waxes lyrical about how great they are, which is how these things go these days.
"I've met a few kittens who were also fairly loud". Phenomenal.
Great review!
Thank you very much for your work. I didn't proceed with a literature phd but do miss this discourse immensely. I pursued a different career, so your videos are my connection to the world I once was a part of.
What career did you choose?
I am a teacher trainer. Love it a lot!
Been eagerly awaiting this review!
I loved The Passenger and think it was more complex than you give it credit for, I think there was a lot of Shakespeare influence (which is always a plus for me) in the Sheddan character and I think he kind of undercut Bobby and Alice's worldview in a way that complicated things. Tbh Sheddan is probably my favorite character in all of McCarthy's work.
Unfortunately, I basically totally agree with you on Stella Maris. The only parts I really liked were just the extra plot details one uncovers throughout the dialogue that served to flesh out The Passenger more.
This review, like most of his reviews, is very surface level. He never does the deep dive thing except for a few books here and there. I wasn't expecting it from him anyway however.
I related very strongly to the Passenger because I live and grew up in the New Orleans area. It was very obvious McCarthy also lived here and felt at home with the very different society. People who didn’t fit in, persons wanting to escape, geniuses who became divers and befriended other outcasts were plentiful in the “City that Care Forgot”. There were successful trans people, notorious mobsters, incredible researchers, talented musicians, novelists, artists.
My favorite passages were when the extremely damaged Bobby free associated his despair on the road to Idaho, on the beaches in Mississippi, visiting the former home in Knoxville. The experiences of Bobby made it difficult to distinguish dreams from reality. Stella Maris vibe was totally opposite from the Passenger-as was Alicia to Bobby. She seemed very clinical to almost robotic while Bobby was very emotional and passionate. I couldn’t finish a passage where she was describing drowning. I wasn’t disturbed about the airline crash not being resolved-it was one of the plots in pathetic Bobby Western!s living nightmares.
Great reviews! I read The Road and Blood Meridian back in the day, probably too young and inexperienced, and I never got excited about them very much. I've seen praises and praises of McCarthy's work and only now after hearing your mixed reviews I'm actually interested in picking up his book again.
Let's goo! Was waiting for this review!
While Suttree never resonated with me at all and I always gave up reading it after ten pages or so it was very different with these two. - Even if it were juvenile I couldn't see anything wrong with that. I was a highschool teacher, and now retired, I miss the students a lot, exactly because they were "juvenile", that means for me they were curious, open to discussing ideas and don't pretend to know everything already, what makes "grown ups" so boring and uninteresting to talk with in comparison. - I think you cannot read Stella Maris fast, maybe I am just stupid or senile, but i had to read it slowly and passages twice to understand it all. Now, when I did understand it right, the questions and allusions seem to me to dig really deep. I know of no other writer who even comes close to tackle subjects like in Stella Maris. Like to relate the questionable ontology of math to the problem of evel. To me that is a really thrilling idea. But, okay, I'm a juvenile boomer ;) .
DFW's new sincerity was precisely trying to tackle this same issue. Of anti-intellectuals relegating everything to pretentious ramble once the wisdom starts sliding off their relatively smoother brains. So ironic that those with these claims are probably the least wise of them all.
Good review, and some interesting thoughts on the works. :) I know I'm likely in a minority, but for me The Passenger is McCarthy's greatest work; "greatest" maybe not so much in flawless execution but rather in reach and ambition. The themes are broad and grand, and the characters I thought were the most fully realized that he ever wrote by a fairly large margin. Although I would have to politely disagree about the "grumpiness" or "boomerism" of the books. I thought the concerns raised were rather valid, and its observations rather astute. I do understand why the books might not jive with a lot of people, but for me personally I thought they were magnificent. :)
I thought either Cormac McCarthy didn't actually write the Passenger and Stella Maris or was forced to include certain themes in them. It seemed evident that he had to check certain talking point boxes to get them published or something.
what is the books of umberto eco that he use dialogue in it please ?
It's something he does in all of his books (he builds his characters and their world through their dialogue) - I would say he does it most notably in Foucault's Pendulum!
Felt the same way. A few months after finishing I read Suttree. Hit me much harder - the reactionary gut instincts were churning out the feeling that something much deeper was going on beneath the language of that book. At times that came through with TP - SM, but the pair felted dwarfed by the healing quality of Sut's lonesome death-conscious mosaic.
Whatever is going beneath the surface of Suttree is discussed more definitively in his last two books.
I think you criticism is certainly valid - but the quality of the writing and the ambition behind these books make them work for me.
I thought both books read like someone other than Cormac McCarthy wrote them.
@FleurPillager it seems like everybody wanted another fun violent movie.
Great review as always. Like others, I've been waiting for you to talk about these books.
That aside, will you do Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, Brooklyn Crime Novel? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Yes! The review is coming in a few weeks :)
@@TheBookchemist Nice!
Awesome review! Thank u
Stella Maris is my favorite!
I read only The Passenger, and probably will have to reread it to get a more clear view of it, but my first thought was that the interests that mc carthy had in his final years, especially liviing in santa fe institute and being really interested in science, had a huge influence in this book, which wasn't particularly good to the storytelling. I mean, sometimes it seems that he creates dialogues just to show his knowledge about those dificult topics. I have a degree in engineering, so I found most of those parts cool, but at many timesthey dont have any connection to the plot itself. The characters sometimes appear to exist in the book only as a channel to the author expose part of his conversations and learning that he had in the institute during those final years. I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, but the I think that it works only when it helps to strenghten certain characters to the reader, I mean, to make them more real. In The Passenger, though, I don't think he achieved that in most of the book, because the characters in many passages look cold and, sometimes, like robots, and don't appear to be real at all. Having said all that, I've got to say that I really enjoyed reading it. He was a great writer.
I had your exact same impression - some of the scientific writing felt too much like showing off.
@@TheBookchemist Don't forget about the dialogues, too. It felt off and unrealistic, almost DeLillian (not criticizing D., just making comparisons). McCarthy is known for writing realistic dialogues but this one just felt off.
When has McCarthy ever written a Character drama where the dialogue was meant to illuminate some character's psychology or move the plot forward? Maybe only Ncfom, a reworked screenplay.
Vast majority of dialogue in McCarthy's oeuvre stands apart from the narrative. He wasn't going to change in the last two books. I thought the scientific rambles in Stella Maris were very well done and were relatively decent in the Passenger as well. These two books are undoubtedly meant as inquiry pieces. Philosophical works more than novelistic. The science is there as another aspect of the ideological tapestry. The conversation style is Socratic, which seems to reinforce my assumption.
It only feels like that because almost all other novelists don't pick these topics, so it is unusual. You could say most other authors show off their ideas about social relations or psychological problems etc. It doesn't feel to us that way because we are so much used to it. @@TheBookchemist
Umberto Eco resonates with me a bit more even when his work doesn't always click with me.
Cormac McCarthy on the other hand tends to be complete hit or miss. The Passenger was a miss for me. Stella Maris I liked barring the technical talk which was at times interesting but also detracted imo from the emotional depth.
I think there is a sense of paranoia throughout both books. Like the scene with the IRS agent was way too unrealistic. I think it was a hallucination. Maybe Bobby has schizophrenia too.
Or he died and this was a life review in the afterlife.
Good review, thank you. I'm a fan of McCarthy's work but you articulated much better than I could a certain qualm I felt about his last pair of books - nothing that diminished my enjoyment, but just an edge or niggle of dissatisfaction. Stellar Maris I pretty much read as a philosophical work and I did register an incongruity in what felt like McCarthy's views being expressed through this very young woman. Your boomerism remark struck a chord.
As an aside, I found it sad you felt it necessary to bend over backward apologising for your lack of effusive praise and assuring readers your critique didn't apply to them as people. If McCarthy was indeed expressing adolescent views, well maybe that's a reflection of our culture. The widespread propensity to take offense at things is about as adolescent as you can get.
Thank you for the comment David!
I agree with your criticism of the juvenile angst. I also thought that Stella Maris was a vehicle for McCarthy to show off his years of studying advanced physics. It became oppressive.
It seems weird to criticize McCarthy for being over the top when his most "over the top" work (Blood meridian) is extremely historically accurate (and even then he toned down some of the carnage that visited the frontier during the 1850s, as reported by John Sepich). The problem seems to me the modern reader's unwillingness to even entertain these highly pessimistic ideas, unless wrapped in some dystopian, anti-capitalist narrative, when they suddenly become prescient simply because of their relevancy to modern life in a metropolis. Relatibility, perhaps, is the barrier.
As I get older I seem to understand McCarthy's perspective more and more, and trust me no anti-natalist/nihilist was I ever, nor am now. Juvenile is the most ironic descriptor for these books imo. It's an issue of not being on the writer's wavelength, I believe. McCarthy is not over the top because he is unintentionally trying to parody himself, instead, as DFW very rightly pointed, it's the modern reader's unwillingness to meet anything serious as anything else but satire and parody. You can see the same reactions with another writer like Dostoevsky (although a prose stylist he surely was not, I agree).
You mentioned Jonathan Lethem and it's precisely because of writers like him or writers with the same attitude as him that we no longer have Great contemporary writers like we used to in the 40s, 50s, 60s etc. I am not being cranky, modern mainstream fiction isn't competing with those early eras in terms of literary value. Part of the reason I think is because of this "anti-intellectual" attitude to anything serious. I am also surprised that The Road seemed so tense to him given a good 90% of the book has literally nothing happening in it.
Some of my favorite authors in the last few years have been writing fiction full of current media talking points including Cormac McCarthy and Louise Erdrich. If I didn't know better I'd think they were being strongly encouraged by someone or something to say certain things. The Passenger and Stella Maris didn't really seem like Cormac McCarthy wrote them. Same with the last 3 or so of Louise Erdrich's books. It seemed like a checklist of all of the common media talking points; aliens, George Floyd riots, mental health, transgenderism, abortion, Buddhism, etc. To me there was something slightly off about it if you know his work.