Passenger Box Set: The Passenger, Stella Maris

Description

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with a two-volume masterpiece in an artfully designed box set. The Passenger is a fast-paced and sprawling novel while Stella Maris is a tightly controlled coda, told entirely in dialogue. Together they relate the thrilling story of a brother and sister, haunted by loss, pursued by conspiracy, and longing for a death they cannot reconcile with God. The Passenger 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western, a salvage diver, zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the boat deck 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. Stella Maris 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western is twenty years old when she arrives at a psychiatric facility with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Review: Provocative, deeply serious, and unexpectedly funny. - Cormac McCarthy said that he was aware that in his fiction he had not succeeded in creating a vivid and interesting woman and that, in the twilight of his career, he was going to try to put that right. Boy did he succeed! Alicia Western is funny, immensely articulate, a staggering mathematical genius, vastly well-read, so emotional that she weeps playing a rare violin she has purchased with her inheritance (she eschews a career as a concert violinist that was probably within her reach had math not intervened), and, as her psychiatrist notes, “very attractive.” (Her response when he tells her that is not printable here.) She is also, because she is a Cormac McCarthy character, schizophrenic and suicidal. I’m sure you have characters in fiction you long to sit down with and just talk and talk and talk. Alicia has gone to the front of my list of such characters. "Stella Maris" is a novella that consists entirely of transcripts of interviews between Alicia and her psychiatrist in the eponymous facility for psychiatric patients in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. (Although there is a picture of the facility at the beginning of the novel, there is no such place in Black River Falls. At least one internet sleuth claims to have traced the picture to a facility in Maine: the Maine School for The Feeble Minded.) "Stella Maris" is, essentially, part of the predecessor novel "The Passenger". Knopf chose to publish them separately, but issued this two-book set that I am reviewing. They should be read together, with "The Passenger" first. "The Passenger" starts out as a mystery and remains one but it is a metaphysical mystery in which numerous plot threads are not resolved. Kafkaesque characters appear and disappear. Ominous threats pervade everything but are never fully explained or resolved. The main character, Bobby Western, Alicia’s brother, is always running from something but he is never quite sure what. Conspiracy theories abound, especially from a private investigator Bobby hires (whose background is not, as seems almost invariably the case with such fictional characters, as a former detective but as a carnival worker). The doom-laden landscape which McCarthy has created and pervasively portrayed in his fiction looms over everything but here is redeemed by a panoply of fascinating, and often hilarious, characters who spend a lot of time talking in New Orleans restaurants. And what better way is there to escape a doom-laden landscape than that? There is a lot of humor in "Stella Maris" too because Alicia is an endearing smart ass. If you like blindingly smart humor that pops into discussions of complex mathematical problems, quantum mechanics, and the confounding nature of reality, then Alicia is your gal. I don’t mean to suggest that these books are funny. They are deeply tragic. McCarthy didn’t go all mellow on us in these autumnal works. But there is some wonderful dialogue, some of it laugh-out-loud funny. And some characters that will stick with you, including John Sheddan, who speaks euphuistically and calls Bobby Western “Squire Western.” For fans of Fielding’s Tom Jones, touches like that put a shine on the apple. Henry Adams’s wife Clover famously noted of Henry James that it wasn’t that he bit off more than he could chew, he chewed more than he bit off. That was never McCarthy’s problem. I give these books five stars not because they are “good reads” with tightly knit plots, because they aren’t, but for the portentous scope of their ambitions. The plot of neither novel resolves anything. McCarthy knew it was not possible to resolve anything and he wasn’t going to lie to us about it. Review: First Volume Great! - Not fully resolved however. But great philosophical gems. Second volume excruciating — couldn’t finish it.