The Passenger and Stella Maris

“What do you do after you’ve written Road?” asks The Jenny Jackson, Cormac Mccarthy’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf. “The answer is two books that take on God and existence.” The Pulitzer Prize winner returns with new novels, siblings like their protagonists, Bobby and Alicia Western. Passenger, a winding 400-page saga, The follows Bobby, a math genius and son of one of the creators of the atom bomb, who works as a salvage diver in 1980 while wrestling with a loss he can’t process. Bobby finds plane wreckage off the Mississippi coast, but it’s what he doesn’t find that puts him in danger. Maris, a prequel set in 1972, further introduces Stella Alicia, a doctoral candidate in mathematics even more brilliant and tortured than her brother. Alicia’s intelligence has been considered frightening since childhood, and at the novel’s onset, she checks into a hospital and is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The 200-page book is a transcript of Alicia’s sessions. “It’s a format for Cormac to allow Alicia to explore her obsessions, which from what I can tell happen to be Cormac’s obsessions,” says Jackson. Alicia is also the first female protagonist in Mccarthy’s bibliography. “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years,” says Mccarthy. “I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.”